Un Jardin sous la Mer

Hermès launched Un Jardin sous la Mer in early 2026, three years after Un Jardin à Cythère. Christine Nagel, who leads the house’s olfactory creation, answers in it “the call of the open sea”, the theme Hermès chose for the year.

The house places this unexpected garden in Polynesia, on the island of Taha’a, an unspoiled place where mountains and reefs, plants and corals converse in perfect harmony. The fragrance joins the Parfums-Jardins collection, opened in 2003 by Un Jardin en Méditerranée.

A garden you cannot smell

Christine Nagel starts from a travel memory: a coral garden in the lagoon, which she gazed at just beneath the water’s surface. She told Vogue Scandinavia that you smell nothing underwater, and that this frustration became the most creative part of her work.

She says she wanted to break away from the marine cliché, with no salty spray and no memory of sunscreen. In words published by the house, she found underwater “a true garden, bursting with life”, where corals dance like tiare flowers in the wind.

The materials of Polynesia

The tiare flower, the national flower of French Polynesia, is its central subject. Nagel pairs it with the tamanu nut, a coconut fiber extract and a Tahitian vanilla, which she says she chose for its texture rather than its sweetness.

From the coconut, she sets aside the milky flesh, which she finds heavy and greasy, keeping only the fiber. She also wanted a mineral, slightly salty note to give the whole its backbone and to evoke the reef more than seawater.

The house’s own words

Hermès today presents the fragrance as floral and musky and names three main materials: the tiare flower, the tamanu nut and a mineral coral accord. It places it in the register it calls fresh and delicate, the one it also assigns to Un Jardin en Méditerranée.