Scent your home with flowers - a post for the green fingered.

£48. That’s how much it costs to scent your home with Diptyque’s beautiful Rosa Mundi candle. If it’s the middle of winter, or you live in a flat and have money to burn (literally) I understand the desire to buy this object of loveliness.

However, £48 buys a hell of a lot of real flowers. Not the rubbish ones that don’t smell of anything from the florist, I’m talking about growing your own.

Last May I moved from my sky high urban flat to an old Victorian terraced cottage. It’s tiny and a little bit knackered, but there is a garden. As the proud owner of green fingers I couldn’t wait to plan my much missed outdoor space. I have only a miniscule front garden, South facing and elevated from the lane by rickety stone steps.  Its patio area is just big enough for a few planters and a deck chair from which I can tipple gin in the summer. At the rear of the house is a yard filled by an old outdoor toilet shed. I plan to sow a ‘cut flower’ patch in grow bags upon its roof when the sun rises high enough to battle for daylight dominance with the neighbouring woods.

The garden was a mess, an overgrown patch of shrubs that had never seen a blade and waist high grass on a mission to self-seed dandelion clocks and sadistic thistles. My determined Dad spent several hours ‘strimming’ the grass, pausing every few minutes to rethread the machine as its exhausted cord broke repeatedly. Meanwhile I destroyed my back digging up a plethora of eye pokingly sharp cordyline plants. I have a fear of spikes…

Hardcore strimming event

Whilst it was too late in the season to grow many seeds, I couldn’t resist giving life to some sweet peas. I spent 99p on a packet of ‘Spencer Mixed’ variety which by August grew into a 5 foot high pot of scented glory. For the next couple of months my house was filled with their intoxicating fragrance and I slept soundly lulled by bedside vases of this frilly wonder.

My Mum divided her old fashioned carnation plants and gave me clumps to plant up by the patio. If you’ve never smelt a garden grown carnation you will be astounded by its peppery floral fragrance. Imagine a Caron boutique in the 1950s and that’s about it. They smell exactly like Bellodgia. A single bloom can fill a room with a strident Oeillet olé such is its bold exuberance!

Carnation and Sweat Pea Spencer Mixed spicing up the dining table

The neglected white Rosa Alba that lived here had bolted to a giant straggle. Although a few Dior-esque petals remained it needed lopping almost to the ground to encourage healthy new growth next year. Meanwhile I headed to the garden centre and chose a David Austin ‘Generous Gardener’ climbing rose to satisfy my craving. Chosen for its scent, this pink beauty smells like the finest Rose Damascena absolute with a teeny hint of sugared almond. Sadly I knocked its heavily budded head off in a clumsy car exit but it rapidly grew back.

My Generous Gardener in full bloom

My plans for 2017

It will be a summer of vivid scented annual flowers. My ‘Spencer Mixed’ sweet peas are growing vigorously. In October I transformed a worn out G-Plan side table into a miniature bubble wrapped greenhouse to see if it really is possible to ‘overwinter’ annual seedlings in the cold damp Pennine winter. It is. In May I will plant a second variety ‘Sweet Pea Promise’ – a posh one from Thompson and Morgan that promises to be hugely whiffy.

G-Plan greenhouse

Sweat Pea Promise from the Thompson and Morgan website

Early flowering scent will come from Stocks ‘Appleblossom’. Stocks have a heady narcotic whiff, which with just a few stems is intoxicating. More than a few is a whopping migraine.

                                          Stocks Appleblossom from the Thompson and Morgan website

My perennial white Phlox plants will hopefully reawaken and battle the slugs to bring some elegance once again. Their scent is a marvelous combination of the skanky indole that we devour in our white floral fragrances and a more delicate and fresh green nuance that brings brightness and vivacity and makes the plant smell ‘youthful’.

Phlox

Some shrubs inherited from the previous owners have proved to be seasonally boring. They will be dug up and replaced by lavender, the foliage of which will make an excellent 'leafy bit' in my indoor arrangements. 

Last year I waged war on slugs. I had millions of the little thugs. With Joseph and his neighbouring cat friends around, the use of toxins was not a possibility. This year I’m conducting an experiment. I am collecting my own hair in order to create hairy rings around the base of tender seedlings. I never brush it so a hair wash yields lots of useful strands! Apparently slugs hate the dry texture of hair and wool and won’t cross it. The witchy side of me loves the idea of having a part of myself lurking sentinel like in the garden. My grandmother would have approved of this frugal and somewhat pagan approach.

Joseph strolls his territory wall

I’ll post an update in early summer and let you know which plants yield the greatest fragrance. I would dearly love to hear from any of my readers who tend a fragrant garden. Your recommendations would be gratefully received in the comments box.

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Review: Guerlain - Idylle, And Why We Should Stop Wasser-Bashing

Consider Idylle, presuming that numerous Odiferess readers are Guerlain devotees, how many of you actually know what it smells like or own a bottle?

Some time ago I chatted to a Sales Assistant in Selfridges who used to work for Guerlain. We were occupied sniffing niche roses together when she announced that she thought there were none comparable to the beauty of Idylle. Somehow I’d never smelt it despite about 20% of my wardrobe being composed of Guerlain scents.

Why do we ignore this scent?

It could be due to the phenomenon of Wasser-bashing. When Thiery Wasser succeeded Jean Paul Guerlain as In-House Perfumer at Guerlain, he embraced on the terrifying prospect of directing the output of the world’s most revered historic fragrance house. How do you possibly create the next Shalimar, Jicky, Mitsouko or L’Heure Bleue, the fragrances that signify the archetype in a market of stereotypical genre replications and adaptations? Add to this the 1990s acquisition of the brand by LMVH (Luis Vuitton Moet Hennessy) that I suspect necessitated a whopping great output of scents, and we have a very pressurised career. I can’t imagine that LMVH would relish a potentially uncommercial quirky scent that might be a flop, potentially meaning that the innovation of the avante-guarde in line with scents such as Vol De Nuit or Apres L’ Ondee would be undesirable unless marketed as an ‘exclusif’ and priced up accordingly.

Wasser perfects the sniff and pout technique

And then tells someone to do something expressively..

That said, Wasser created a superbly quirky scent in his Acqua Allegoria Flora Nymphea. The name possesses connotations of fairies, watercolour washes and girly stuff, not very appealing to me, the owner of a pair of Doc Martens and a tool box. But the scent! Oh my.. this is a gargantuan wodge of hardcore feral floral sex, perhaps as stonkingly indolic as Fracas (Robert Piguet) or Tuberuese Criminelle (Serge Lutens). I did not expect to be challenged to my floral limit by a scent containing the word Nymph. Wearing it requires one of those ‘safe’ words used by people who practice S&M. I’ve reached my boundary, I need out!

He’s clearly not sitting on the ‘safe’ bench, despite the restrictions of the parent company.

I admit to having developed a whopping great crush on Monsieur Wasser. It’s partly because of his voice, Swiss born, his accented French has a peculiar sweetness a little like when Bjork speaks English with a haywire intonation. Add to this that he looks damn fine in a well cut suit and we have an enigmatic handsome man.

I’m waffling.

Back to my point. Idylle is an exercise in elegance and simplicity. Released at a time when the perfume world was churning out increasingly lurid exercises in fruity patchoulis, and amber orientals were rising to niche domination, Idylle quietly arrived shouting not very much at all.

For his first large mainstream release within Guerlain, Wasser chose to encompass the history of French perfumery in a bottle. There was however no nod to the Guerlain house style, no powdery iris, no tonka bean and vanilla sweetness, simply the great ‘trilogy’ of Frenchness – rose, jasmine and lily of the valley. With just a little patchouli and musk to earth the composition, Idylle is a thoroughly minimalist chypre.

Of course, in the employ of Guerlain, Wasser could draw on the finest ingredients. Heady Bulgarian roses hand picked at dawn and (in a later ‘Duet’ Flanker) an unusually fruity jasmine sourced from a resurrected plantation in Calabria, meant that simple could be exquisite.

Wasser checks out the rose crop (during my fantasy holiday)

The first appearance of Idylle took the form of an EDP which was followed a year later by an EDT, my favourite of the two formulations. Whilst the EDP possesses the greatest depth of grand patchouli rose, the EDT’s top notes radiate an almighty great whoosh of lilac and lily of the valley. It does not last very long, but that gives me an excuse to spray repeatedly, relishing my hit of intense green florality. Both share a similar heart with the Bulgarian rose sitting majestically dominant. And that’s all it is. Essentially a very good floral chypre with no ringing bells or dancing bears.

As perfume lovers we often yearn to smell the unique, that which smells unlike any other fragrance we’ve encountered before. Idylle doesn’t offer this experience, perhaps that’s why it lacks a vocal following amongst the online perfume community? What it does do however, is present a recognisably ‘French’ composition, an exercise in how to convert classical ingredients into an elegantly understated wonder. As the perfume industry churns out increasingly high numbers of new scents, with superstar perfumers ‘creating’ at record speed, there feels like nowhere else to go in terms of innovation. I am thankful that Monsieur Wasser rejected the notion of a ‘concept’ scent and pared his perfume back to a sumptuous simplicity.

If you would to know more about Wasser’s rise to Guerlain head-honcho (or just want to feast your eyes on him whilst glugging gin and crisps on the sofa), the BBC’s marvelous 3 part documentary on the perfume industry is still available on Youtube. If you input Guerlain + BBC + perfume you should find it.

Rose lovers might also find the following posts interesting:

• Neela Vermeire – Mohur & Scent On Canvas – Rose Opera  
• Robert Piguet – Calypso & Parfum D’ Empire Eau Sauve

Oriental Roses: Neela Vermeire - Mohur & Scent On Canvas - Rose Opera

Last spring I wrote about two of my favourite ‘alternative roses’, taking an exceedingly French angle with the exploration of Robert Piguet’s broody masterpiece – Calypso and Parfum D’Empire’s effervescent – Eau Suave. You can read about them by clicking here.

For the rest of the year my nose fatigued of the ongoing replications of current trends, i.e. rose + oud and rose + patchouli, samples of which lay unloved the dusty yawn of my ‘unlikely to review’ box. However, I searched hard for word worthy roses and discovered two with distinct and worldly personalities. Although both classified as unisex, I interpret them as ‘his and hers’ orientals, Rose Opera by Scent on Canvas and Mohur by Neela Vermeire Creations.

The Rose In Victorian Orientalism 

For him:

Men just don’t wear enough roses, and when they do it’s often butched-up with buckets of black pepper or a strident wood. I’m thinking of Cartier’s Declaration D’ Un Soir here which makes me sneeze uncontrollably with watering eyes. Some of the finest roses hail from the beauty counters of the high street, in particular YSL. I would grant a definite second glance to a man striding past me in a cloud of the aldehydic mossy rose - Rive Gauche (women’s version) or in the fizzy, sour, rose-Ribena of (the rather sickly named) In Love Again.

Scent On Canvas present an abstract rose composition that is dominated by a dry spicy saffron note, rendering it sufficiently butch to avoid being perceived as overtly feminine.

A complex composition, Rose Opera rather suits it’s orchestral name. It does that peculiar thing that we associate with Mitsouko in that it’s so well blended that single notes (it’s instruments) do not shout for noisy dominance, in fact some are undetectable amongst the symphonic aroma simply serving a supporting role. A peak at it’s Fragrantica page reveals that many can smell a wild strawberry note. I highly doubt this would be the case if it weren’t previously revealed to be nestling amongst the top. I can’t detect it. Above all else, this is a distinctly arid spiced oriental, rich in saffron, smokey woods and cardamom, where even the suggestion of rose appears in an abstraction. Alike YSL’s eternal spice bomb Opium, it lasts for aeons, unlike Opium, it’s subtle.

Maria Coluccelli's beautiful artwork for the Rose Opera  packaging

Rose Opera fits into the heavily replicated genre of ‘Cod-Arabic Rose’, a bore-fest of Western perfume houses filling everything with oud, naming it something to connote a desert or souk and overpricing it. Except, that this one is not boring. It’s beautiful. Thankfully it’s creator, Jordi Fernadez, avoided the recognizably nose piercing screech of dominant oud and relied on alternative harmonic notes to create a much softer souk-a-delic trip.

'Souk-a-delic', soon to be as frequently mentioned as 'fruitchouli' and 'floriental'

For her:

In opposition to the aridity of Rose Opera, Neela Vermeire’s Mohur is a heady voluptuous juice. Although it shares many notes with the former, it drenches you with the suggestion of rain on petals. Meteorologically, more Indian, which fits rather well with Neela’s heritage and the inspiration behind the range of scents.  I’ve been underwhelmed by recent Duchaufour compositions, but this one feels truly creative, as if he’s felt genuinely inspired by the brief.

Again, describing individual notes in Mohur is a challenge. Although it is noticeably ‘rosy’. This time the concept of rose is less abstract, feeling akin to the milky and almost ‘apple-like’ sensation that occurs when you press your nose into an old fashioned globe shaped shrub rose. My mum grew a ‘Geoff Hamilton’ rose in her previous garden that gave off a scent of such profound beauty that it would necessitate sniffs on an hourly basis. Rather than shrieking ‘rose’ it was creamy, powdery, confectionary and woody, as if it were soaked in Mysore sandalwood. This is how Mohur feels.

The Geoff Hamilton Rose

Mohur was inspired by an olfactory concept of the time of the British Raj in India. An Anglo-Indian atmosphere is conjured here by an impression of Masala chai (tea). We think of tea as a quintessentially English habit, amplified by the idea of the civil servants and gentry who inevitably continued their tea parties and upper class twittery on the croquet lawns and polo fields of their ex-patriot creation. This isn’t an old fashioned British brew up though. It is the exotic cardamom rich delicacy first offered to me by a mini bus driver in Dubai. I admit I gagged at the spiced tea, made bizarrely sweet and lukewarm by the inclusion of Nestle condensed milk, but it grew on me over the following months.

Tea chaps?

So that’s Mohur, a candied and creamed sandalwood rose with an exotic eau de Holland and Barret tea bag appeal. I adore it. I want a full bottle.

Also worth a mention:

La Parfums De Rosine - Rose Kashmirie (smells a little like the scented towels given out at up-market Asian restaurants, but in a beautiful way).

Ormonde Jayne - Ta'if (peppery and woody oriental rose, elegant and sensual)

Neal's Yard - Pure Essence EDP 2, Rose (as natural as a rose can be, affordable and photo-realistic).

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