Forget Gertrude Jekyll or even Capability Brown - some of the most captivating gardens in the world have been created by perfumers. Liz Hancock sniffs out the private places where famous noses have sought inspiration
I am walking behind Serge Lutens, the creative director of Christian Dior in the 1960s and 1970s, and perfumer to Shiseido since the 1980s, as he shows me around his garden in Marrakech. Immaculately clad, despite the 30°C Moroccan heat, in a tailored black suit, Lutens, 66, occasionally darts off the path into the dappled greenery, emerging minutes later with a flower or seeds for me to smell. 'This garden has a personality that doesn't want to expose itself,' he says in his thoughtful, poetic manner. 'Except for the palm trees, everything else grows in the shade. The garden and I are similar. I wouldn't like to be too public and this is not a public garden. Every time I walk around here I discover something I don't know, because the garden grows itself.'
Lutens's nine-acre private garden lies down a dusty road in the Palmeraie, the national palm grove, hidden away from the camels and tourists. After walking through a large dark wooden door set into a traditional Moroccan wall, you are greeted with a series of paths that cut through a gentle jungle in which chickens, turkeys, peacocks, frogs and a couple of cats happily cohabit. Inside grow many of the plants that inspire Serge Lutens scents - rose, jasmine, laurel, myrtle, pepper, fig, apricot, almond, orange - plus arid vegetation such as cacti, eucalyptus, Australian bottle-brush, lantana, prune trees and cyprus. Over the past 34 years he has planted thousands of trees and more than 60,000 roses (of which only three survive), along with tulips and other bulbs from his native France. He has learnt the hard way. 'Anything fragile that I plant here doesn't grow. When I told people that rose trees weren't surviving with us, they said, "Oh, you must change the ground, the earth," and I said, "Well, why therefore not the sun and the sky?" If you have to change everything, then it's not a Moroccan garden. You have to be happy with the reality, otherwise it's nothing.'
Lutens's scents, such as Sa Majesté la Rose and Arabie, share the same exoticism and sensuality as the country he has called home since 1974. Originally from Lille, Lutens was holidaying in the South of France after signing with Dior in 1968 when on impulse he boarded a ferry to Morocco. 'When I arrived in Marrakech there were women with big white sheets underneath orange trees shaking the trunks to make the flowers fall,' he recalls. 'The whole city was perfumed with the orange-blossom. I stayed for three months; it nearly brought my contract with Dior to an end. I was deeply in love. Without Morocco I'd never have done perfumery.'
While he has spent years renovating a cavernous house in the medina, it is the garden, 30 minutes from the old town, that inspires him - so much so that he speaks of it as a muse. 'At night a flower will give a perfume suddenly and you say, "Ah, what's that?" It disperses over the whole garden. But in the day it might be nothing. You can discover the time of day here with your nose.'
Scents inspired by gardens are nothing new. Take Guerlain's Jardins de Bagatelle, a white floral fragrance named after the 18th-century château and gardens in Paris; or the Penhaligon's perfume Elisabethan Rose, based on the classic roses of Vita Sackville-West's garden at Sissinghurst. On a much more personal note, memories of her grandmother's garden in late-summer bloom prompted Antonia Bellanca, the woman behind the cult perfume brand Antonia's Flowers, to create the fragrance Floret from blended sweetpea and apricot. Jean-Charles Brosseau's Jasmin-Lilas was built around the scent of lilac floating across a neighbour's garden in late spring, just as the jasmine comes into bloom. And Olivia Giacobetti created the Premier Figuier scent for L'Artisan Parfumeur after being inspired by a fig-tree in her family's garden in Corsica.
In a twist to this garden-to-scent sequence, for this year's Chelsea Flower Show the horticulturalist and florist Mathew Dickinson has created a scented garden for the perfume brand Jo Malone. Based on an English summer garden, it features a large 'floral fountain' in the centre and a bed overflowing with thyme, orchids and lily of the valley. 'The idea is for it to be a sensual experience,' explains Dickinson. 'A lot of the gardens at Chelsea you can't go into, but the whole concept of the Jo Malone brand is the experience of its smells. So all of the plants we're using have fragrance, and the idea is that you walk in and it's this oasis of scent.'
George Dodd, a maverick 'nose' who creates natural perfumes for the fragrance company Scent Systems, works from a studio in a remote part of the Scottish Highlands, where he holds workshops and personal consultations (www.aromasciences.com). 'I live here purely for personal inspiration,' he says. 'I'm sitting here looking out of the window across a wild sea loch on the North Atlantic coast. I come out of my house every morning and take a breath of that wonderful scent of sea and wild heather we have. It is wonderfully wild.' As well as incorporating notes of heather and broom in his raw, visceral fragrances, Dodd harvests bog myrtle from the valleys, distils it and uses the oil, which he has rechristened 'Highland myrtle'. 'Your sense of wellbeing to some extent comes from unconsciously picking up smells in your environment,' he says. 'This is, I think, the key role of gardens, and the reason why they've been emphasised in so many mythologies. In cities people are in quite an alien environment, with smelly cars and traffic and stress, and I think it's very important to get back that vital contact with nature.'
That daily contact with nature is something the celebrated perfumer Edmond Roudnitska - who is considered one of the greatest noses of all time - prized above all else. High in the mountains near Grasse in the South of France, is Ste Blanche, the botanical paradise he created from desert heath between 1948 and his death in 1996. It was here that his independent studio, Art et Parfum, created some of the perfume world's classics, such as Dior's Eau Sauvage, Diorella and Diorissimo (a scent based on lily of the valley, Monsieur Dior's lucky flower and the 'scented expression of his soul'); Eau d'Hermès; Elizabeth Arden's On Dit; and Rochas's Femme. 'Many of these fragrances wouldn't have existed if he hadn't been so totally immersed in nature on a daily basis,' says Roudnitska's son, Michel. 'He even had several beds of lily of the valley planted, which he sniffed at different times of the day to catch its subtlety, as well as the surrounding atmosphere with its green and fresh tones, which can be found in Diorissimo.'
Among the cedar, cypress, sequoia, maple, magnolia and willow trees that Edmond Roudnitska planted in his seven-acre garden, there thrive jasmine, roses, violet, wisteria, lilac, irises and lush herbs. 'This land - dominant, wild, even a bit austere - resembled him,' says Michel Roudnitska. 'He was a man of challenge and ideal. His motto, "I will make flowers bloom on stones and birds sing", is engraved at the entrance of the property and summarises the thought that drove him during those 48 years of fierce labour.'
Michel Roudnitska continues to run Art et Parfum as a niche perfumer in the tradition his father established, maintaining Ste Blanche as a symbol of Edmond's quest for 'a humanist ideal and a deep feeling of respect for nature'. Roudnitska senior is said to have spent at least two hours every day walking around the grounds. 'To him it was the perfect antidote to the austere intellectual reflection he devoted himself to in his office, and it was above all a crucial source of inspiration for creating new perfumes,' says Michel. 'Growing a garden requires a lot of patience; it's a great lesson of perseverance, and this is the very quality we most need in the perfume-making world.'
PLANTS FOR PERFUME
Mathew Dickinson, the creator of the Jo Malone garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, recommends his favourite plants for creating your own scented garden
- Lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis) A herbaceous perennial whose arching stems support richly scented pendulant white bells
- Mock orange (Philadelphus 'Manteau d'Hermine') A beautiful summer-flowering shrub that smells deliciously like orange-blossom
- Scented geraniums (Pelargonium 'Graveolens') Place by paths so that they scent the air as you brush past
- Daphne (Daphne odora 'Aureomarginata') A winter-flowering shrub with a knockout scent. Plant close to the front door so that you smell it every morning
- Moroccan mint (Mentha spicata crispa 'Moroccan') In summer the spiky purple flowers will fill the air with scent
- Serge Lutens scents are available from salons-shiseido.com
