Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant to be a kind space, so please try not to give or take offense, and let’s all agree to disagree when opinions differ. In fragrance as in life, your mileage may vary! YMMV.
Today is Friday, June 3, and it is the first of my “summer Fridays”! As I did last summer, I am taking Fridays off work in June and July, using up some of my massively underused leave time. To be honest, it has been an exhausting two years, having added COVID-related duties to an already full plate at work, so the long summer weekends were a boon last year. I’m very happy to be able to have them again this summer!
I’m looking forward to doing a lot of fragrant gardening; we just installed a “dry creek” for drainage in our garden, which leads into a “rain garden” to catch excess water. Our soil is very dense clay, typical of this area; and in a wet spring such as we had this year, it gets so sodden with water that we’ve had water in our basement, erosion on a small slope in our back yard, and areas of lawn that haven’t been able to grow any grass for ages. The dry creek is a rock-lined channel that leads to a sunken area filled with gravel, then soil, then planted with vegetation that doesn’t mind wet feet. That’s the rain garden, which holds the excess water until it can percolate down into the soil. I’ve incorporated a number of pollinator-friendly and native plants. The dry creek has a long, low berm alongside it, for plants that need good drainage, which I will plant with creeping rosemary and upright silver lavender, mixed with some fragrant dianthus and creeping phlox as groundcovers.
So that’s what I’ll be doing this weekend, and my hands will smell wonderful after handling all these scented leaves! Speaking of lavender, I used to think I didn’t care for it much as a fragrance note, and now I love it. I think Jicky eau de toilette was the turning point for me. Do you like lavender? Do you have any particular favorite lavender-centric fragrances? What about rosemary? That’s a less common note in fragrance, I think; one of my perfume souvenirs from our recent trip to Italy was a bottle of Carthusia’s new A’mmare, by perfumer Luca Maffei, which has a vivid rosemary top note. It’s a great summer scent, and I look forward to getting to know it better.
Serenity Now Scents and Sensibilities 
That’s so exciting. I love hearing about your garden. And I adore lavender. My favorite lavender fragrances are Chanel Jersey, Chanel Boy and Lutens Encens et Lavande. For a sweeter lavender I love Mon Guerlain. One of my very best travel memories is a trip my son and I took to Whidbey Island, WA, where we visited a lavender farm. The heavenly smell and the wonderful low humming sound of the bees buzzing in the lavender blooms is one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. I would love to go there again.
I’ve been wanting to try the new L’Artisan’s that are supposed to smell like a veggie garden. They sound interesting, but I’m not sure if I want to smell like beets! We’re having an arborist come look at our trees as it’s now hurricane season. My yard has many trees, including two very large live oaks, which I love. I want to keep those beautiful oaks as healthy as possible. When I get the electricians and the shelf company paid off for the complete redo of our electrical system and our whole new pantry shelf system, we’re going to hire a nearby nursery that specializes in native plants to help us figure out what types of plants we need to add to our yard to help the local ecosystem. We have lots of birds and squirrels already so we must be doing something right, but I know we could do better to support the critters, especially the butterflies and bees.
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Live oaks are so beautiful! We have white oaks and water oaks around us, but only the water oak is actually ours (and we too have periodic visits from an arborist). We’re very worried that the new owner of the property behind us, who is an out-of-town developer, will cut down the white oaks on that property when the company decides to tear down the current house and build a new one (which we know is the plan).
There are so many beautiful native plants available nowadays. Some have been hybridized to have more colors, or larger flowers, etc. You’ll have fun choosing!
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I wrote too much and Spam ate my comment. Arrgghh! :-))
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Found it!
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I’m envious (a little 🙂 ) of your summer weekends. I really dislike our “unlimited vacation” policy: as the result, we end up taking less time off than we used to when we had some pre-defined number of days.
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Apparently that is quite common. “Unlimited paid time off” also means companies don’t carry unused leave on their books as something that is owed to employees, which improves their bottom line. Good article here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220520-the-smoke-and-mirrors-of-unlimited-paid-time-off
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