Field Notes
Limited-edition batches of scents and scented products composed with rare and precious materials.
What field notes are about
Olfactory studies of the natural world.
Lingua Planta is a collection of perfumes that emerge from our ongoing research into the language of plants.
Field Notes is the archive of our research into our relationship with plants, an ongoing series of limited editions where fragrance, field notes, and observation all serve the same purpose: helping people connect to the living world more deeply.
Each edition begins with an observation in the field; a scent that has caught our attention and pulled us toward a deeper understanding of what scent means in the life of plants. The result; the perfume, together with our observations, is released in small batches, documenting threads of curiosity and discovery as they happen, woven into the daily ritual of wearing perfume.
A language older than words
On Tomato Leaf
Long before we had words, plants had scent. Every fragrance released into the air is a message, a molecule shaped by millions of years of evolution to warn, to attract, to defend, to invite. This is the language of scent; Lingua Planta. Learning to read it doesn't just change what we smell, it changes how we see the plants around us, a shift from looking to listening.
Few plants are as unusually chatty as the tomato. Its leaves and stalks are covered in trichomes, tiny glands that store scent and let it go the second you touch them. When a caterpillar starts eating a leaf, the plant clocks exactly which species is attacking it, and releases a very specific cloud of fragrance to call in the one predator that hunts that caterpillar; a parasitic wasp, summoned by scent alone. It's chemical eavesdropping, happening quietly in every greenhouse and garden bed, whether or not we're paying attention.
The ripe fruit has its own trick up its sleeve, too. As it ripens, the scent turns sweeter, greener, more insistent, a signal aimed squarely at us, or whichever creature happens to be wandering past looking for a snack. Coevolution at its most delicious: the plant gets its seeds carried off into the world, we get a very good reason to keep tending the vine. Nobody involved seems to mind the arrangement.
Tomato Leaf is our attempt to bottle a little of that conversation, one more entry in our ongoing research into what scent means in the life of plants.
