Jo Malone Wild Flowers and Weeds Collection: Quick Impressions

It's that time of year again when Jo Malone releases a limited edition collection based around some twee hail Brittania themed aspect of life on the big island. I always wonder how they are going to come up with a new idea each year but so far the collections continue to delight. This year's theme is inspired by the weeds and wild flowers that grow wild on the banks of Britian's winding rivers and canals. I thought the painting below is a good representation of this bucolic and languid state.

Two Women Asleep In A Punt Under the Willows, 1887 by John Singer Sargent

As I stated last year when I wrote about The English Fields Collection, I always get excited about the scents but when I eventually try them there is often a let down. They are usually fleeting and faint on my skin. Last year's collection of scents had a couple I really liked but the bottles were just awful. This was unusual because normally Jo Malone can be counted on to have a quirky and creative marketing campaign to introduce the scents and the bottles are normally appealing.

This year Jo Malone has outdone itself with the bottles for the Wild Flowers and Weeds collection. I would love to own each and every one. I like these bottles even in their bare state; they are slim, squared, slightly weighty and fit perfectly in the hand. The botanical drawings on these bottles are off-the-scale cute, and happily for me my two favorites are also my favorite drawings. However, as much as I am over the moon with the presentation, the fragrances do the usual one to two hour fade away on my skin, with one exception.

Lupin & Patchouli

This scent is meant to represent canal banks lined with colorful flowers. The lupin is a bright showy flower that can grow to a meter tall and has a spiky top. It can be an invasive species, thus it could be thought of as both a weed and a wildflower. The perfumers interpreted the lupin into a scent representative of its color and strength. There is also rose in the formula but this note wasn't evident to me. When I first spray Lupin & Patchouli I smell a herbal, slightly minty smell; in my notes I wrote "a mentholated smell." But this disappears really quickly and there is a very pretty floral which I quite like but find difficult to explain, as it is an invented scent. Don't get too attached to it though, because patchouli enters the picture and takes over. It is a green, earthy patchouli, and if like me, you enjoy this note then you're in for a treat. If not, avoid at all costs because this is mostly about the patchouli. Lupin & Patchouli was the only one of these scents that had any tenacity on my skin. I could still faintly smell it the next morning.

Hemlock & Bergamot

This is the other scent that I quite like. When I hear the word hemlock I think of something dark and foreboding. Hemlock was used by the ancient Greeks to carry out death sentences, most famously on Socrates. The flowers, which you can see pictured on the bottle, look bright and innocent and so is the scent in Hemlock & Bergamot. The first spray starts airy and slightly sweet and I sense a touch of powder. It continues to have a creamy, sweet presence and to me the scent is very innocent and spring-like. The use of mimosa and heliotrope add to this powder aspect of the scent. When I'm wearing it I picture an alpine field dotted with flowers. It smells pure and fresh. I like it but I can see how this could be devisive -- a love or hate scent.

Nettle & Wild Achillea

"Crikey, this is green!", was my initial reaction on spraying Nettle & Wild Achillea. Another description that popped into my head was swampy green, which makes some sense in the context of thinking about plants growing alongside a river. There is also a bitter note. Nettle is herbaceous but if you've ever come into contact with it, you know it can have a sting to it, thus why it's sometimes called stinging nettle. Does the bitterness represent the danger of the plant? Wild Achillea is more commonly known as yarrow, and the properties of yarrow are also aromatic and bitter. Yarrow was used in times past to stop bleeding, relieve the pain of a toothache, and gently stimulate the immune system when taken at the first signs of a cold. After the rather harsh green opening, which tiptoes very close to unpleasant, the scent turns into a very nice musky green fragrance, light and easy to wear. I have other scents in my collection with this light green note and while their bottle isn't as pretty, they last a lot longer on my skin, so I won't be getting this one.

I came across this nice Scottish folk song about yarrow, or wild achillea, mood music for the review:

Willow & Amber

Willow trees have been a facet of British nature lore for centuries. The tree's long string-like leaves fall gracefully to the ground and along the river bank they will be caught in the current with a graceful pull. In Othello, Desdemona sings a folk ballad called The Willow on the night she will be murdered by her jealous husband. In Hamlet, the tragic heroine Ophelia falls from a willow tree and drowns in the river below. Jo Malone used headspace technology to capture the scent of willow leaves in flowing water, which is interpreted as a woody note. There is always one scent in these collections which I can literally not smell, and this one would probably be the one in the Wild Flowers and Weeds Collection. There is a very gentle whisper of light green scent and soft cashmere woods. I thought I would always be able to recognize amber but here it is so soft I wouldn't have known it was there. To me this is "a fresh air scent". It is pleasant and I can't imagine anyone disliking it, but I'm not sure anyone would love it either. On me it is a gentle skin scent.

Cade & Cedarwood

This is another very pretty bottle. I wish I could put my Jo Malone London Rain Black Cedarwood and Juniper cologne into it, as the illustrations fit and it is an altogether better scent. I was a little confused by the plants referenced in this cologne. The other weeds and wildflowers go with the riverside theme beautifully. I'm not an expert in the flora alongside British rivers and streams, but are these trees common? I'm being pedantic, I know, but it just didn't fit in quite as well with their theme, in my opinion. But aside from all this, how does it smell? While the other scents are very spring-like this one definitely feels more like autumn. The cade is slightly spicy and this note translated into a sort of chai tea scent on my skin at times. The cedarwood is gently aromatic and at times I catch a drift of smoke. The smokiness probably comes from the base note of ciste labdanum which intensifies the darker aspects of the scent. Case & Cedarwood is a very wearable scent and could be thought of as the baby brother of Black Cedarwood and Juniper. For someone who would like a light woody scent with mild spice and slight smoke, this could be the ticket.

All the colognes in this collection were created by Perfumers Yann Vasnier and Louise Turner.

Perfumes were sampled at David Jones Australia.