Cape Town’s Wild Olive Artisans and UK landscape architect Johanna Gibbons raise consciousness through scent
Beyond the typical floral or spicy notes of perfume, imagine a natural parfum that evokes soil itself… Perfumer Madalina Heneck of Wild Olive Artisans and landscape architect JoJo Gibbons RDI have been on a four-year-long journey to capture the scent of soil.
“Imagine soil, silently beneath your feet, encapsulating our identity in an illustration of deep time, natural process, and human endeavor. This below-ground narrative of physical and human geography is the foundation on which our very existence relies…” says Gibbons.
Both Heneck and Gibbons have spent their lifetimes exploring plants, soils, and scents. Gibbons is one of the UK’s most respected landscape architects. Her multiple award-winning practice J & L Gibbons is behind places like the landscape of the new Munch Museum Oslo and The Natural History Museum, London. Her work spans four decades, during which time she has developed a passion for soil biodiversity and an ability to recognise the health of soil through its scent, which is what prompted her to reach out to Heneck to initiate this unique collaboration.
Heneck is a self-taught perfumer and the creative director of Wild Olive Artisans. This Cape Town-based manufacturing business promotes the skills of artisans through its work for prominent clients across the globe. It has standalone shops in Cape Town and Bucharest – which is Heneck’s city of origin. In her perfume laboratory, she uses only 90 exceptional quality natural perfume ingredients, mostly from African regenerative and organic farms, and suppliers that she has personally vetted.
Together, the soil-passionate duo’s vision and experience have borne a powerful and visceral perfume that is simply named Erde (which means “Mother Earth” in Anglo Saxon). Gibbons and Heneck hope it makes sensory connections with fragile ecologies and landscapes that we must learn to nurture.
Erde is not supposed to be just a pretty smell. Its intense, loamy notes plummet the receiver into the depths of the dynamics of soil. It is a parfum that dares to explore the conceptual, by creating a sensorial celebration of our landscapes and hopes to raise consciousness at the olfactory level. It is environmental activism in a scent.
A message in a perfume bottle if you wish, “to inspire the notion of planetary health and catalyse the collective capacity of humanity to act through sharing and protecting the earth’s beauty and vitality, bringing back fundamental values to the highly demanding mosaic of contemporary life,” says Gibbons.
“It is estimated that we have only 40 harvests left if we continue our current trajectory,” she adds. “We have lost touch with the very thing upon which our very survival as a species depends. With Erde, we are hoping to restore that connection and return us all to a state of reverence where soil preservation is paramount.”
To develop the unusual perfume, Heneck progressed beyond the boundaries of conventional perfumery, incorporating tinctures of soils, grasses, mosses, roots and various decayed barks and woods. “It was an exploration of the landscape in the field and the laboratory to select, stabilise and encapsulate the essence of soil,” the perfumer explains. It was a lengthy and rigorous process of selection, preparation and stabilising of the materials. Much patience was required for each of the production stages to reach maturation. “This was an extraordinary challenge, and for me perhaps the most meaningful endeavor to date!” Heneck admits.
The perfume is packaged in a glass test tube-like vial and a box made from recycled paper, with a design inspired by the Munsell Soil Colour Chart, which is an aid to the identification of soils by colour with varying degrees of hue, value and chroma. Minimalist and environmental, it is in line with Wild Olive Artisan’s philosophy of the “shortest path from crop, or soil in this case, to product on the shelf”.
Now that the perfume is ready, the creative duo wishes to encourage artists, makers, and thinkers in the soil space to reach out and join forces with them in order to send the message to as many as possible.
The message Erde delivers is conveyed through the medium of perfume, an aspirational product, and that is perhaps the masterstroke here; for it raises what some might consider to be the dirt beneath our feet to the level of desirable, thereby alerting our attention to soil and amplifying its importance in our lives. The earthiest of messages, placed within the world of luxury, a sensual reminder of that which nurtures us at a fundamental level.
By dabbing Erde to your temples or pulse points, you are invited, says Gibbons, “to experience a form of sustenance from a reawakened sense of awareness of the critical nature of soils, their preciousness and life-giving force.”
The perfume is available from the Wild Olive Artisans physical shops and the online shop, with shipping to South Africa, Europe, and the UK, for now.
For more information, visit www.erdeverda.com or https://www.wildolive.eu/ or https://jlg-london.com/
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