When a Wild Olive artisan and a landscape architect get together – it’s a conscious collaboration! Cape Town’s Wild Olive Artisans and UK landscape architect have created a natural parfum, Erde (Mother Earth), evoking soil itself.
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.
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 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. 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 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.
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.
The perfume is packaged in a glass test tube-like vial and boxed in recycled paper, and is design inspired by the Munsell Soil Colour Chart, an aid to the identification of soils by colour with varying degrees of hue, value and chroma.
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 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
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