Foraging for Spring Scents, With a British Perfumer

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/t-magazine/lyn-harris-perfume-london-regents-park.html

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Lyn Harris is in hot pursuit of lilacs. On a recent spring morning, the revered British perfumer makes her way through a sea of wild grass and cow parsley in an untamed quarter of London’s Regent’s Park. “It’s so idyllic,” she says of the springtime scene: In this quiet corner, the incessant hum of central London traffic is eclipsed — almost — by birdsong and bell chimes from St. Marylebone Church. “You’re in the middle of town, and yet it feels so wild.”

The first female classically trained nose in England, Harris can be seen walking like this and foraging for flora and fauna most mornings, as the park connects her Primrose Hill home to the Marylebone shop and laboratory of Perfumer H, the British boutique fragrance brand she founded in 2015. “I love that smell,” she says as she inhales a clutch of dandelion leaves plucked from the side of the path before adding them to her basket. “That greenness takes me right back to my childhood.”

Harris, who is originally from Halifax in West Yorkshire, spent long school holidays with her grandparents in the wilds of the Scottish countryside just outside Aberdeen. It was here that she acquired her creative affinity with seasonality — and the constant flux of nature still inspires and informs her scents. “The seasons are very much a part of how I create,” she says. She traded the north of England for Paris to study under the late perfumer Monique Schlienger in her early 20s, before heading to Grasse, the epicenter of scent, where she spent five years at the prestigious French fragrance manufacturer Robertet. She’s been working with the company as an independent ever since. “When I lived in the South of France I really missed the change of season — it renews your thought processes and reinvigorates everything in your life,” she says.

In 2000, along with her partner Christophe Michel, Harris established Miller Harris, the global perfume business that created the bespoke scent L’Air de Rien for Jane Birkin. After a brief hiatus, Harris decided she wanted a slower pace and launched the impeccably curated, small-scale scent brand that is Perfumer H. It’s a label that’s imbued with an incredibly personalized feel: Harris is often found serving customers on the shop floor with the scents she’s created.

Nowadays, Harris — who favors an understated uniform of Saint James sweaters and Margiela sneakers — often sets herself down under a tree in the park, notebook in hand, and brainstorms ideas for new fragrance combinations. These frequent foraging trips spark ideas that are the starting point for her richly layered scents. Sometimes her intention is to capture the smell of the park after a storm, or a flower she’s found there, sometimes what she’s foraged will become one of some 40 ingredients that make up an entirely different, often complex perfume.

“I like to gather all my subjects,” she says, as her feisty Border terrier, Pop, investigates a patch of sticky willow. “This is the beginning of the process for me. I love every season, but spring is a particularly special time. There’s the first glimpse of bluebells, the daffodils are waning, the wind is blowing and the blossom is fading. I’m thinking about how I can translate that — and seal it — into a smell.” Back at the studio, she’ll lay out her haul of flowers and foliage, and begin sketching out notes on aromas that are combined, or recreated, using a balance of natural and chemical essences.

Perfumer H releases five seasonal scents biannually (there are currently 35 in the collection, and a bespoke service is also available) in accordance with the traditional fragrance families of citrus, floral, wood, fern and oriental. All have deliciously native and naturalistic notes: the latest quintessentially English lineup features Sweet Pea, named after a flower synonymous with British summertime, alongside ‘Rain Wood’ and ‘Mist.’

Today’s haul of stray seedpods and bark fragments, cow parsley and dandelion could well form the foundation for the next batch of summer scents that Harris is currently concocting. And then she spots them, hidden away in the shadows right at the outer reaches of the park: “Lilacs!”