FLOWER POWER: One other 12 months, one other plant. For the annual Jardins, Jardin event held in Paris’ Tuileries Garden in early June, Chanel is casting a highlight 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, because it once served because the greenhouse of the previous Tuileries Palace. 

Upon arrival, to set the scene, guests encounter a 2,150-square-foot garden bursting with colourful 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 shiny lights calls the bitter orange tree essentially the most generous in perfumery. That’s because various parts of it are utilized in fragrance-making. Petitgrain comes from the distillation of that tree’s leaves and young branches, as an example. 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 various parts of the orange trees happen for Chanel. The home has linked with the Mul family, which farms plants organically, near Grasse. 

Round the corner, in one other room, it’s possible to learn the way such raw materials are integrated into Chanel perfumes. From the Collection Les Exclusives, as an example, 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 can be the signature flower within the Paris-Riviera fragrance, meant to conjure up one in all the trips Gabrielle Chanel took during her many travels, in addition to within 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 concept that perfume, so immaterial and impalpable, comes from something concrete, real and really artisanal, just like the soil, the flowers, the harvest.” 

Last 12 months in Jardins, Jardin, Chanel featured the Camellia japonica, which is the important thing ingredient blended into formulas for Chanel’s No.1 first clean beauty line. 

Pre-pandemic, in 2018, Chanel’s contribution to the event was among the house’s key fragrance flowers from Grasse, including jasmine, May rose, iris pallida, tuberose and rose geranium.