How to smell in nature (when you have been conditioned not to)
Breathing in the full-fat scents of the country
A little reintroduction as I’ve gained a few new readers of late, and a ‘Hello!👋’ to my Apotheke perfume followers and customers who have joined us here on Substack.
I’m a perfume brand founder in my late ‘30s, who like many in lockdown, pivoted to a slower, rural setting (I’m in Somerset, England) from a previous life as an editor in London and Berlin working for magazines and fashion brands.
This newsletter, MAKING SCENTS OF IT ALL: is a mix of fragrance industry insights, musings on the history, and psychology of perfume, and how I try to understand my own life, by locating myself in the seasonal scents around me.
Welcome, and thank you for reading. I hope, in some small way, this newsletter will give you a different perspective on your sense of smell, and how engaging it can make every day better.
Crouching in the vegetable patch
Enough has been written on what it is to have your fingers deep in the mud digging for potatoes or stained with the Barbie-pink secretions of blackberries.
I try to recall some prolific lines of nature writing as I crouch in the vegetable patch, but all I can hear is the creepy voice of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the ‘60s movie saying:
"Lick an orange. It tastes like an orange. The strawberries taste like strawberries!’
Would it make sense to you if I said, that’s how living in the countryside feels after years of city life? And as a scent obsessive, those things smell full-fat after a lifetime of low-cal dinners.
I plunge a bucket tied to a rope into the river, the water is skank and deep. What if I swam now? No one can see me or take a picture of my head bobbing above the green, for me to post later on and write ‘wild swimming!’
When is swimming ‘wild’ and not just swimming? When is picking your dinner ‘foraging’? And when does walking through brambles become ‘hiking’?
Someone across the valley is having a fire. The smoke is guttural and connects to my nose like a deep stretch, unlocking muscles I’d rather stay knotted, in fear of admitting how crunched up I’d been all this time.
I grew up in a Welsh, Victorian suburb built on coal money. The rich merchant boat owners built big houses on the beach for themselves, and then more houses for their workers and servants, which got incrementally smaller and less impressive as they stretched back in neat rows.
Each house was allocated a garden that had been sectioned, and forced into stamps of pruned green. That’s what I thought nature was, something that was controlled by someone else who portioned a piece to determine your worth.
I left when I could, with the proverbial handkerchief tied to a stick on my back, heading for concrete cities, where the sky never got properly dark. I ripened over fifteen years, on urban streets in apartments without even a slip of what the snake-shoed estate agents would call ‘outside space’. The only flowers I encountered were ratty blooms that rebelled out of pavement cracks, pushing up through cigarette ash, dog shit and litter.
But here, in the earth, things grow and grow from the rain, and nitrogen-rich soil, and bend and twist against the wind. And smell like our ancestors told us they did.
Back in the veg patch, we don’t do much to help things blossom and ripen. We throw the odd bucket from the river over the tomatoes and French beans on a hot day, but it’s more of an excuse to escape from the children for a moment, than to nurture the plants. They grow anyway, they don’t need us.
The abundance feels crass somehow, I don’t take any pictures in the veg patch. It would feel as tacky as posting a mid-cycle bikini shot if I shared the jumble of sky-high sweetcorn, sweetpeas and cabbages the size of coffee tables - it’s also something to do with not taking my phone, like if I took it into that space, it would break the spell.
August - the last hurrah
What is it about the end of August and the final bank holiday weekend, that feels like the last hurrah? Like a month-long New Year’s Eve. The plateau we’ve waited for all year as the plans we made: flights and dates rush past, and moments that we’ve imagined for so long become celluloid and real, stocked and boxed as memories.
We go to stay in nearby ancient cherry wood to try and slow things down. That’s something they don’t tell you about getting older. When you are young, you are always rushing to the next part: the bit where you find love, lose ten pounds or get taken seriously at work, and then it’s the opposite, you are always trying to stop time.
It’s so dark in the woods, I can’t see my hand in front of my face when I climb out of the yurt to pee in the night. I might die like this I think, trip over a guide rope and slip on my urine. But I don’t die, I climb back into the bed I share with my daughter, in a roundhouse, constructed exactly as they were in the Iron Age, with my family around me breathing in and out in the inky darkness, so quiet I hear the blood in my ears.
We bring speakers and playlists, whiskey to drink like cowboys around the fire, and ideas to share, but instead, we sit in silence. We don’t open the whiskey, there’s nothing to escape from, nothing to drown out. The stars show off. Our hair is pondy.
There’s a rip in the arm of my dress, I stop thinking I should sew it. I haven’t looked in a mirror in days. I stop thinking about how I look, I don’t feel self-conscious about my glasses. We make coleslaw slowly, it rains and it doesn’t matter, we put the wet things by the fire. The babies and children sit in hammocks on top of each other, with no screens, no toys, just a piece of cloth tied between two trees. They would stay there all night if we let them, switching places, and rocking back and forth.
I think about what makes something ‘a good time’ and how it’s three equal parts: the anticipation of the thing, the actual doing of the thing, and the memory of the thing. We didn’t take any pictures because we knew the thing was good and we’ll remember it anyway.
When I worked as an editor in fashion brands we would talk about ‘She’. She was the customer, and we tracked her calendar, feelings and motivations like crazed lovers, trying to find any opportunity to sell her more clothes she did not need, like Christmas jumpers and statement sunglasses.
We knew that she would take two holidays a summer. We knew more about her than she could ever imagine. We called the first vacation: the ‘Fashion Holiday’, the one She shopped for in a big way. We planned all year for it. We needed her to imagine herself at the restaurant table in a fresh white dress and third-day tan, or a new basket bag at the market buying peaches and bread.
The second we called the ‘Real Holiday’ the one we anticipated she took at the end of August, perhaps with family, or people she needed to impress less, where linens were greying and her sandals had started to look ropey. Perhaps we could sell her a knit for the campfire? Or a less slutty swimsuit for ‘real’ swimming? She rebelled at this time of year, and it was hard to get her to enter her card details for this vacation, we didn’t like it at all.
Right now I am She, in my dress with the ripped sleeve, hair still wet from the river, and you know what? It feels okay.
Happy August bank holiday everyone.
As a 1960s girl holidays were entirely focused on lying prone to get The Tan, coated in Ambre Solaire. Now as a senior my whole life is a holiday but at a leisurely, sensual pace. Ten minutes from my house I've the sea with the smells of seaweed and the crashing sounds of the waves on wild days. I turn around and I've the lush foliage and colours of the South Downs a step away, heather and bracken scented and just now blackberries and elderberries to forage.
Happy Bank Holiday, i hope we all manage to store some late August memories to carry us through.
Thank you for your beautiful writing! Sitting here thinking about how I want to be a She going on real holidays