Chanel Plants Flowers, Trees in Paris’ Tuileries Garden
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Another year, another plant. For the annual Jardins, Jardin event held in Paris’ Tuileries Garden in early June, Chanel is casting a spotlight on the orange blossom tree.
From Thursday to Sunday, people can experience it through an immersive visit held in a garden and installation tucked behind the Orangerie museum — aptly chosen, as it once served as the greenhouse of the former Tuileries Palace.
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Upon arrival, to set the scene, guests encounter a 2,150-square-foot garden bursting with colorful flowers and trees, including some lent from the Château de Versailles’ greenhouse.
Inside a structure, neroli from France, which stems from the orange blossom’s distillation, is highlighted. People can sample a whiff of that from air hand-pumped through glassware.
Chanel in bright lights calls the bitter orange tree the most generous in perfumery. That’s because various parts of it are used in fragrance-making. Petitgrain comes from the distillation of that tree’s leaves and young branches, for instance. Visitors can sample petitgrain’s odor, too.
A map outlining the South of France, including Vallaris Golfe-Juan and Le Bar sur Loup, illustrates where various harvests of different parts of the orange trees take place for Chanel. The house has linked with the Mul family, which farms plants organically, near Grasse.
Next door, in another room, it’s possible to learn how such raw materials are integrated into Chanel perfumes. From the Collection Les Exclusives, for instance, the Eau de Cologne has a neroli component. The scent wafts from a black cylindrical tube hanging from the ceiling, enclosed in a white tent-like semicircle.
Neroli is also the signature flower in the Paris-Riviera fragrance, meant to conjure up one of the trips Gabrielle Chanel took during her many travels, as well as in the No.5 Extrait, where it plays a discreet olfactive role.
A quote from Olivier Polge, Chanel’s perfumer-creator, on a wall reads: “I like the idea that perfume, so immaterial and impalpable, comes from something concrete, real and very artisanal, like the soil, the flowers, the harvest.”
Last year in Jardins, Jardin, Chanel featured the Camellia japonica, which is the key ingredient blended into formulas for Chanel’s No.1 first clean beauty line.
Pre-pandemic, in 2018, Chanel’s contribution to the event was some of the house’s key fragrance flowers from Grasse, including jasmine, May rose, iris pallida, tuberose and rose geranium.
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