Celebrating Mother's Day With Iris: Serge Lutens Bas de Soie

This is a true story.

My memories of my paternal Grandmother who died when I was only seven are of a stern woman dressed in a plain housedress, hair in a loose bun, and orthopedic shoes that made her look much older than her years. Life had not been kind. She lost her husband when her oldest child, my father, was only six, leaving her with three children to care for. The Great Depression was literally at her doorstep. Times were hard everywhere and especially in a small Texas farming town. I remember her in sepia tones of grey and brown, not much color in  her simple life. But there was one glaring exception. Every spring colorful showy iris, which ran in a bed that stretched from her small boxy house all the way to the street, would burst forth in a variety of gorgeous colors. The iris were so delicate, almost sensuous in their beauty. How did this shadowy woman I remember come to love these exotic blooms?

When my Grandmother died my father dug up many of the bulbs and transplanted them in our back flower bed. My Grandmother's garden had iris of many colors, but when they bloomed in our backyard they were all purple. Every spring we would be treated to a showy display for about a month, a living reminder to my father of his mother.

Flash forward many, many years. My father had died about eight years before. I was living in Singapore and had just flown out of the country after wishing my Mother goodbye, saying "see you at Thanksgiving". I had barely unloaded my bags when I got the call that my Mother had a cerebral aneurysm and was dying.  I rushed back, hoping for a final moment, but she slipped away sometime when I was over the Pacific. My memories at the cemetery are hazy and Dickensian in nature: dark brooding skies, cold winds, black garb and somber faces. In retrospect I realized this had to be my imagination. It was September. I know I wore a sleeveless dress. Where did I get these images? However for eight years I had no desire to revisit the burial place.

When my sister and I were cleaning out my mother's house one of my sister's friends made a loving gesture. She went to my Mom's house and dug up some of these same iris bulbs that had come from my Grandmother's house forty years before and transplanted them in my yard. For years their green leaves looked healthy but I waited in vain every year for the purple blooms which never came.

Last year which was eight years after my Mother's death, my sister was in town for a wedding. I decided I was finally ready to visit my Mother's grave. It was a gorgeous early spring day. As we drove down the country road leading to the small family cemetery we passed through a tunnel of trees lining the road, gently bowed and providing our path with dappled scattered diamonds of sunlight that broke through the leaves. We eventually came to the gate of the cemetery. It is a small rustic plot of land for extended family only, so uncrowded and perched on a gentle hill. There were patches of Texas wildflowers dotting the unmanicured ground: the blue of bluebonnets, pink primrose, red Indian paintbrushes. I was astounded. It was beautiful. Instantly all the dark unhappy images my brain had conjured for all these years were erased and I was left with the image of this peaceful scene.

As we drove home I felt the lightness of my heart. Trip completed we drove into my driveway. There in the bed by the drive was one single perfect, purple iris. It had unfurled since we left the house from a bud I had never noticed. It seemed like a magical exclamation mark from my Mother to punctuate the ending of a healing day.

This year the iris were plentiful and are a living reminder of my Grandmother, my Father, my Mother, and the ties and memories that bind us together as a family.

My Mother wasn't much into scent. A bottle of Wind Song that was there when I was a child was still half full when she died. She was always impeccably put together as so many women of her generation are: perfectly coiffed hair, neat matching attire. At eighty she had fretted that she was losing her waspish waist to the battle of lax muscle. She grew up in an era when good manners and graciousness were hallmarks of being a lady and she lived these values to the end. I sometimes long to hear what she would think about the degeneration of these attributes in the almost decade she has been gone.

So I have no scent memories persay to identify with my Mother, but these iris, passed down through the family, seem a good place to land on Mother's Day when I'm searching for a scent. There are so many iris perfumes to consider, and I hover over one of my top ten perfume favorites, Prada Infusion d'Iris. But what I ultimately decide on is even more perfect, and a scent I had forgotten, Serge Lutens Bas de Soie. The perfume created by Christopher Sheldrake was released in 2010 to mixed acclaim. I remember being indifferent to it at the time, and this was the era when Serge Lutens was everything. Some called it too shrill, too cold, too piercingly sharp. Most reviewers agreed, though, that the mix of hyacinth and iris created a perfume that transported the wearer to visions of blue. I also get this sensation, which goes along with my purple-blue iris just wonderfully.

On opening there is a moment of cool hyacinth. The scent quickly starts to expand, as if getting life from oxygen. It becomes more green, like the first signs of spring gardens when the weather is still crisp. The orris notes of the iris join in and the duo of iris and hyacinth compliment each other with their cool greenness. There is a definite French refinement to this scent. Bas de Soie translates from French to mean "silk stockings" and that is what the perfumer is trying to convey. The luxury and properness from an era when women's legs were always clad in stockings, preferably made of fine, almost invisible silk. My Mother used to tell me a story of how in World War II, when she was a sixteen year old working in an office, she would use and eyebrow pencil to draw lines up the back of her legs to disguise the fact that stockings were unavailable in the days of war rations. I feel I could time travel a bottle of Bas de Soie back to 1940 and into my Mother's hands and it would be totally at home in that era. Like my memories of my Mother, this perfume speaks of refinement and elegant style. Now that I have rediscovered Bas de Soie perhaps it will be my secret weapon to wear as an armor against today's moments of incivility, a talisman to reach for a higher standard. There is something rather regal about the smell of iris. Just as the flower is impossibly beautiful and extremely fanciful, the smell holds itself a bit apart. Is it austere or is it sensual? Is it cold or is it warm and embracing? To me iris is a bit of a mystery and Serge Lutens Bas de Soie is an olfactory illustration of that mystique.

My Mother, Norma. I miss you every single day.

Have a wonderful Mother's Day!

Top painting, Iris Garden, by Ada Walter Schultz. Iris painting, Marianne Broome. Perfume my own.