Un Jardin sur le Nil: Hermès's fragrant journey to Egypt After the success of Hermès's fragrant detours in the Mediterranean in 2003 and the signing of a contract between the perfumer-painter Ellena and Hermès parfums, we encounter in 2005 Un Jardin sur le Nil.
Since his arrival at the venerable house of Hermès, Jean-Claude Ellena has continually offered us magnificent fragrant paintings. Un Jardin en Méditerranée, released in 2003, would be the very first starting point of an initiatory quest through the gardens of the world. Our second journey, in what is now the Parfums-Jardins collection, will take us away from Europe to discover the banks of the Nile and its green paradises in a magnificent Jardin sur le Nil.
Jean-Claude Ellena and his wonderful fragrant journeys for Un Jardin sur le Nil
By welcoming Jean-Claude Ellena as its in-house perfumer in 2004, the house of Hermès chose an extraordinary creator, free from any commercial constraint, since Ellena's style is free, imaginative, and could not exist without boldness.
Jean-Claude Ellena composes his fragrances as he would paint pictures or write books: he travels, becomes passionate, is moved, and brings back all his memories to render them into fragrances. It is exactly through this kind of process that he created Un Jardin en Méditerranée in 2003, then Un Jardin sur le Nil in 2005, and its many other brilliant successors.
On the way back from Egypt, I reread my notes and jot down a short recipe made of fragments of odors juxtaposed with one another; the fragrance has taken shape in my mind. What remains is to give it a form in which everything is revealed: at once light and present, vivid and generous, like an echo of these gardens that line the Nile. Jean-Claude Ellena on the creation of Un Jardin sur le Nil.
Thus, with his travel notebooks and memories in hand, he returns to his laboratories and composes a sparkling, fruity green woody fragrance that will carry the evocative and exotic name Un Jardin sur le Nil.
Un Jardin sur le Nil Hermès and the unprecedented scents of calamus, green mango and tomato leaf
At the origin of the fragrant composition created by Jean-Claude Ellena for Un Jardin sur le Nil, there is love at first sight. An instant passion for a raw material whose secrets he revealed to us in his Journal d’un Parfumeur: his olfactory encounter with mango: I bring it to my nose. The odor seduces me. A profusion of fragrant images, of resin, of orange peel, of grapefruit, of carrot, of opoponax, of juniper, a fresh and sweet odor, energetic and tender. Jean-Claude Ellena, Journal d’un Parfumeur.
Thus the green mango, so sweet and fresh, meets a powerful and dynamic grapefruit. Then, right at the heart of Un Jardin sur le Nil, we plunge into its gentle waters through notes of lotus flower, and the green, delicately spicy calamus, typical of Mesopotamia. Yet the hyacinths and peonies bring us back with their floral scents toward the riverbanks. Finally, the depths of this extraordinary garden guide us into mysterious forests wreathed in incense and lined with vetiver.
Jean-Claude Ellena's magical journeys through his Parfums-Jardins have certainly not finished surprising us.