WASN’T A TEXT, an email or an Instagram message,
ut a handwritten letter from Hermès’s director of olfac-
ory creation, Christine Nagel, that caught the attention
f the Garden of Eden’s gatekeeper. Nagel had been
reaming about creating a fragrance inspired by an Italian
arden. “I’ve been left completely free by Hermès to do
hatever I wanted,” she says. “The only thing I discussed
e [-Alexis Dumas, Hermès’s artistic director] was that it
was quite time we did something to do with a
garden. I wanted to try to reproduce an Italian
garden because I am half Italian.” It was during her
research that Nagel discovered the perfect muse:
Eden, Venice’s largest private garden, which has
been closed to the public for almost 20 years.
“Everyone was saying the garden was closed, that
there was no chance for me to visit,” she says.
Surrounded by a brick and stone façade, and on
the banks of a Venetian lagoon, the mystical green
space has a noble history, with records dating
back to 1884. “Frederic Eden acquired the land
and created this garden — it was a garden of his
dreams,” Nagel explains. With the help of his
sister-in-law, famed British garden designer,
Gertrude Jekyll, Eden transformed the two-and-
a-half-hectare artichoke farm into an English-style garden, complete
with roaming cattle, statues, pergolas and rose trellises.
“After Eden died, the garden was looked after by the Greek prin-
cess Aspasia [Manos] and her daughter, Alexandra [who became
Queen of Yugoslavia]. They lived there without touching it much,”
Nagel explains. In 1979, it fell into the hands of Austrian avant-garde
artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. “Nature was very
important to him and he said he wanted his garden to grow freely,
but it eventually turned into a bit of a jungle, like inSleeping Beauty.”
When Hundertwasser passed away in 2000, he left the property
to his foundation, and it has been closed ever since. “I really tried
my best to go in,” Nagel recalls. “I really wanted the epitome of an
Italian garden, so I hand-wrote a letter to the president of the
foundation, and after a while he asked me to visit him in Vienna.”
Nagel boarded a plane and shared her vision with the foundation’s
president, who bestowed upon her rare and unprecedented access to
the space. “He told me that he gets hundreds of letters every week
from people wanting to visit the garden and he
always said no,” Nagel says. “He probably said yes
to me because I talked about dreams, [like those
Eden had], and he was impressed.”
So began the creation of Un Jardin Sur La
Lagune (a Garden on the Lagoon), Hermès’s
newest fragrance. “On January 4, 2018, the fence
opened for the first time before my eyes,” Nagel
recalls, “and after that, I visited the garden every
single month to see and smell the different
flowers blooming at that time.” Each visit brought
a new layer to the evolving scent. As spring and
summer awakened, so did fragrant magnolias,
jasmine and Madonna lilies. Sweet muscat
grapes ripened in the garden’s vineyards, and
pittosporum, a flowering shrub, flourished with
abundance. Every element of the green space was open for olfac-
tory observation, from the roots of the trees to the hint of salt
lingering in the air. “The note of wood was very important to me
because the roots of all the trees are quite unique. They are on the
surface of the ground and remind me of the lines on a hand,” she
says. “I wanted to represent them, but in a subtle way.”
Indeed, subtlety is Nagel’s forte and this blend exemplifies her
delicate, thoughtful touch. Un Jardin Sur La Lagune is feminine
and floral yet far from an overpowering bouquet, grounded with“A dream is a
concentrationof emotion, ideas
and symbolsin two or three
seconds ...This perfume is
like a dream.”
- PIERRE-ALEXIS DUMAS
A fantasy, a letter, a secret garden ... the story of Hermès’s newest fragrance
is as fabled as the city that inspired it. ByJANNA JOHNSONO’TOOLE
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COURTESY OF HERMÈS146 HARPERSBAZAAR.COM.AU April 2019