Landmark odours are often the least agreed

"I like fort Gardens who feel the savage", gave the poet Pierre de Ronsard. A phrase that seemed to adopt their own contemporaries, including the Minister of Culture, which places under the sign of the perfume its "Rendezvous in the gardens", this weekend, will allow to visit many places of which some are usually closed to the public. Balcony in city, suburban garden, Garden Park, gardeners of the new century found soul and animality over various scents. Flowers, well sure, but also mosses, leaves, fruits, trees, humus, any hair-grass.

Back to the origins after years of odourless lawns giving priority to forms and colors. The first France gardens prided the five senses. In medieval enclosure, the monks cultivated the "simple", medicinal herbs for caring for the sick, to perfume the kitchen... and the human. The first eau de toilette "of the Queen of Hungary", prepared by a cleric in 1370 in the romarin database, promises so beauty and health to those who are oindront. Today, any connected garden self-respecting has a simple square: thyme, mint, lavender, verbena, hyssop, Sage grown for their multiple culinary uses. Or simply the pleasure of offending between two fingers to better extract the aroma.

Touch and smell

Touch and smell mix also in the garden, as Christophe Ponceau, Mediterranean gardens landscape designer. For him, it is not necessary to add in perfumes, heat exacerbates South scents of plants and leaves, in Paris, produce no odour. "Perfume is naturally part of the garden." But if it was pretext for accumulation, the result would be unpleasant, artificial. "More to the North, but is still trying to focus on the fragrant species, of which pépiniériste rigour has deprived the French since 1950, promoting the functional side (long flowering, resistance to weather, forms and extravagant colours) at the expense of the perfume. And to follow the example of Marie-Antoinette. Tired of the sanitized rigour of the gardens à la française of André Le Nôtre, the Queen was growing roses in pots to better move them around their homes thus invaded by their aromas.

Why not imitate it by installing a garden of scents around the House Walking a carpet of violets, open Windows on old roses to become skirt, falling back into the childhood of a lilac, is tenderizing of delicate scent peas. Pick carnations pepper, spicy giroflées. Plant hyacinths, iris and peonies. Revel of a seringat to strawberry aroma, smell a "aztec Pearl" choysia to the scent of flower of orange blossom, enjoy the citronnées scents of a cucumber or the honeyed breath of a honeysuckle. Be seduced by the sensuality of a distinguished gardenia, surrender to the languor of the vanillés heliotropic is squeezing in the smell of a Mount Etna broom. Climb on walls glycine or Clematis, verge hedges of troènes, look at the boxwood to reek of sacristy.

So let drain languorously embaumées seasons even the approach of the frost. The landscape gardener PierreAlexandre Risser, King of the city gardens and terraces, furniture fall and winter of sensual blooms. Sweet smell of the "Oregon Charity", heady breath of a hamamelis said "Witch Hazel", softness of a "Viburnum Bodnantense" or a "Daphne Odora", note a star Jasmine Eastern. This beloved gardener of great designers (Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, Emmanuel Ungaro, Kenzo Tagada, fire Loris Azzaro) said however that it is not programmable in a garden. Still less the smell. "Plants are human beings living and unstable, our culture of zapping Backwashing, and it is so much the better." There are electronic animals, not yet automated plants.

The perfume is the most unstable element of nature, even tame. A windshift move, he likes to spread in the mist of the morning, fade during the day, is powerfully exhale evening, invade the atmosphere after a rain storm. Landmark odours are often the least agreed. Humus-reeks of Ivy, mowed grass, Earth wet by a sleet, tangy smell of cut nettle, sweet breeze of the leaf of fig tree Sun, breath cinnamon of a "Buddleia" ("butterfly tree") breathed in an abandoned garden.

François Mauriac has shown the way. Crazy its Malagar roses, it was on inverted pages move Paris in shoe boxes, stating nevertheless prefer the smell of wet earth of the banks of the Garonne, the Vesper breath of Basswood, breathing résinée the pine forest.

Some go further, is intoxicating to smell incongruous, or even sexual, boxwood wet to the whiff of "cat pee" flower of chestnut in the spillage of semen, "Rosa Foetida" acrid note of linseed oil, SAP greenness, remugle a foam... One advice to all those who are rediscovering all this: close the eyes, finding in them the animal asleep by millennia. Indulge that suitable also unpredictable meetings.

Gardens in vials

Just as those that give rise to cults of perfume houses juices. By a spring in Milly-la-Forêt morning, proustien Christian Dior fell nose to nose with his "madeleine", a bed of zinnias. The smell makes him relive his childhood in Granville. He immediately commissioned nose Edmond Roudnitska (father of "Diorama", future spawner "Wild water") a modern soliflore. "diorissimo" was born in 1956. Evocation perfect, never equalled, to an understory of lily of the Valley. In the 1980s, Dido Merwin, an English friend of the founders of the diptych House, them the confidence to the detour of a cup of tea: "When I wear my hands in my face after having picked the cassis for my jams and roses for my bouquets, I am mobbing by impressive two thus combined plant smell!" Perfect marriage of green crunching of leaves of blackcurrant with fruity old rose, "The shadow in the water" generosity moved immediately into success. It remains since twenty years number one sales of the chic boulevard Saint-Germain, ex aequo with the candle sign "berries", wax version of the same agreement.

Some perfumers grow sophistication to reconstruct the atmosphere of a garden in its entirety. Jacques Guerlain was composed at the Belle Epoque "Garden of my parish priest" (to 3 to 5 June in the House Guerlain, 68, avenue des Champs-Elysées), his son Jean-Paul tells in 1983 a history of white flowers, jasmine, gardenia, and tuberous in the light "gardens of Bagatelle". For its part, Jean-François Laporte picks a load of seringat, narcissus and honeysuckle "White Garden" of the master perfumer and gantier. The recent "closed Garden" Diptych perhaps one carrying you most in a garden evokes jacinthe, sweetpeas and white lilac of a cottage of the Devonshire, the Prince gardener"focuses on the vegetable garden to concoct"Sky, my garden!"to the stem of rhubarb.

To the South, the House Jean-Claude Ellena nose reproduced in figs near the Tunisian secret garden of Leïla Menchari, muse of Hermes in "A Garden in the Mediterranean". He then encloses "A Garden on the Nile" in a bottle: a near Garden Island from Aswan with lotus and green mango. But stop there. If we let result so far, we only will never back for appointments to the garden, this weekend, France.