Perfume launch.  Yawn.  At least, that’s how I used to think, back in the day when I had several a month to go to.  Being freelance means you get to pick and choose as you’re not under any pressure from advertisers to attend on behalf of your magazine, duty-bound to write the requisite number of words to keep them happy.  I can only imagine the pressure the girls (they can be 105 years old and the beauty editors will still always be called “girls”, maybe it’s the creams?)  are under in these recessionary times.

But wow! Those people at Jo Malone!  First it was the cream bag, delivered by courier, complete with masses of black tissue and ribbons.  Then the invitation, cleverly wrapped around a copy of Keats, a hint of what lay in store.  Then a car picking me up and taking me to Hampstead, and then, well, hopefully you’ll see from these pictures, a visit to Keats House, a garden I didn’t even know existed, made even prettier thanks to arrangements of white roses, blousy peonies, green pear trees, freesias, everywhere your eyes chose to rest.  There were rustic tables made from logs bunched together; armchairs, the hessian backing tacked on roughly, but the front a calico or linen, smartly upholstered. The sun shone brightly.  All my favourite people were there.  For a moment, I wasn’t in London, but in the English countryside, only in someone’s house I’d rather like to move into. Perhaps if I found a quiet room upstairs I could hide away and they wouldn’t notice, I could live off perfume launch canape-leftovers.

The clue was in the pear trees.  The King William pear is the key note of the new Jo Malone fragrance, coming to a store near you, although you will have to wait until summer is over, I’m giving you the heads up.  Christine Nagel, the French perfumer asked to create it now that Jo herself is no longer at the helm,  struggled with the word.  ”PER” she called it, but it sounded all the more charming for her Frenchness, and although she apologised profusely for her broken English, anyone who can explain the concept of musk as a base note in perfumery as succinctly as she did, really doesn’t need to worry.  (Think of it as the petticoat under a Dior 1950s skirt. It gives volume and shape. The skirt wouldn’t be half as interesting without it. And by the way, musk is nearly always synthetic now.  No one’s scraping it out from animals any more).

Why a French perfumer for a British brand?  Anyone reading this at home worrying about a jobless future for their teenagers, take note: there are no British perfumers! Enroll your kids into one of those perfume schools in Paris or Grasse and trust me, in a few years, they’ll make a fortune!   Okay, there are a couple: Beverly Bain and Christopher Sheldrake, but both of them are busy, one even works for some company called Chanel.  There is also, of course Lyn Harris of Miller Harris, and we love her, but generally speaking, us Brits are one step away on the perfume-evolutionary scale from being Neanderthal Soap-Shirkers. Even though we are apparently the third biggest consumers of perfume in the world, with only the US and France ahead of us.

Still Christine wasn’t about to stamp roughshod over what there is left of our fragile tradition of British perfumes, (think subtly beautiful, with a delicate preference for single notes like Yardley’s lavenders or roses).  ”Autumn” was her rather loose brief from the team at Jo Malone.  For a nanosecond she was taken with the idea of an aldehydic carrot, but luckily for us she moved on quickly to create this pretty floral, which is as far away from sweet, cloying bridal-style florals as possible.

“We chose the moment when you bite into a pear, and it’s crunchy and juicy and fresh,” she says.  A touch of rhubarb, a heart of freesia, a hint of patchouli and some white amber and musk, the latter both signature notes in Jo Malone’s fragrances.  The overall effect?  All mists of mellow fruitfulness, like walking through your garden on an autumn day.  Or someone with a much nicer garden than yours.

PS:  To my delight, I discovered the flowers are by my all-time favourite florist and friend, Nikki Tibbles of Wild at Heart.  And I SWEAR I didn’t know that until after I’d fallen in love with them!  Check out her website here: http://www.wildatheart.com/

And if you like the log tables, or want your interior or exterior made over in this English country garden look, Leila Latchin is your woman, an ex-Wallpaper magazine stylist. http://leilalatchin.com/