A HEAVEN OF SWEET PEAS…… …featuring POIS DE SENTEUR DE CHEZ MOI EXTRAIT by CARON (1927)

There is often something very moving for me about a real profusion of flowers. The cascades of wisteria at flower parks in Japan, the banks of cherry blossom along city rivers, rose gardens in the English dusk. But all of these places are public: made for picnicking and photographing with other people. We go to them with the explicit purpose of immersing ourselves in their scented presence as a specific day out – busloads of tourists go off to visit the tulips or the fields of lavender in Hokkaido : sometimes the very ‘Event Flower’ nature of floral abundance can take something away from their pleasure. Sometimes you want them all just for yourself.

Which is what happened on Saturday. And with sweet peas….flowers I cherish for some reason but which I have never seen in plurality – only a few trailing in my childhood garden or as part of a posey – until we happened to stumble upon a row of greenhouses that were packed to the rafters with them in shades of every pink through purple to blueish mauve with the most remarkably rich perfume that made me well up even when just smelling it through the glass.

We had just been to a vintage furniture shop in the middle of nowhere, a sunny, balmy afternoon, and were walking back past the Samukawa shrine to Miyama station when I spotted the Sweet Pea Farm, the flowers’ names posted in katakana outside on a wooden board – ‘Sweet Peas For Sale’.

There didn’t seem to be anybody there, the office in shambles with bunches of freesias, snapdragons and the pease left randomly on the floor with semi-cut bits of old ribbons and shears. Drawn in by the scent, which was rich and deep, even if I was trespassing I knew I could feign gaijin ignorance and get away with it so before I knew it I had found an opening to the first glasshouse and gone ungingerly inside.

My goodness. It was like being in a John Singer Sergeant painting. A fairy’s dream. The scent, the colour, as the exquisite light filtered down through the slats onto the flowers felt extravagantly beautiful and I felt unanchored. I saw the old lady, who was obviously hard of hearing, as she hadn’t heard us – nor seen us because of the sheer volume of sweet peas everywhere – gathering some fresh flowers, and I knew I wanted some that had just been picked rather than a bouquet that had been lying around on the floor. She noticed us, but didn’t start, or panic, as could easily happen if you suddenly found two strangers uninvited in your flower farm; she just smiled. I oneirically drifted a while longer through the space, taking deep breaths of the scent, which truly was like the oiled extrait of Caron’s original Pois De Senteur De Chez Moi I once had the fortune to receive in the post courtesy of the duchess of vintage perfume, Brielle, we then bought a couple of bunches from the lady, as well as some small turnips she had grown there in other soil, and went on our way. Wrapped in plastic, the flowers wilted, their freshness dissipating by the minute – they are now in the room I am writing this and the scent is way past their best. But I will never forget the sheer captivation of coming across that place so unexpectedly ; neither the vision, the atmosphere, nor the smell. It was pure magic.