Hot Summer Garden at the Stables: the Story of Farnesiana

This fragrance evokes very specific mental imagery due to the natural smelling accords, which I know are actually quite synthetic. The realism of the accords and the focus on Farnesol as the featured through line across the phases of development gives it an idiosyncratic nature.

There are few methods of describing something so and transcendently salubrious. With the scent of another place, a dreamy property with sparse greenery in the background— not a forest but lush farmland. Mimosa covers the sides of the roads, lily of the valley lines the rickety, wooden stakes covered in chicken wire that entrap the aromas of Farnesiana. The garden is filled with fragrant flowers as bees buzz loudly when you step closer. You sit atop a bale of green, steaming hay aside the garden in the humid sunshine.

The powdery yellow puffs of mimosa are contained in the clumps of molecules of water, sitting heavy in the climate of the farmland as you walk to the stables and other side of the property. Here you find a field of wild violets and muget. A strange, scarred tree grows sideways across a dying mimosa bush— sandalwood? How?

You return to the house, which you’ve yet to explore. As you enter a rich musk of resin sits heavy in the air. There is no soot or carbon detectable in air as you observe the sandalwood shavings being heated for distillation alongside pods of vanilla and an odd plant amber— opoponax, the sweet unctuous and slightly musky/animalic accord travels into your olfactory bulb as your D2 and D3 dopamine receptors activate.

You look across the “laboratory” in what should be a kitchen and see a shattered flask with a small puddle of liquid around it. You look at the label on a shard of glass: Farnesol.

Top 5 of all time, possibly 3 or 2…or 1???