Miller Harris Cassis en Feuille

“The rambling vines and bountiful fruit of a forgotten garden”

Miller Harris is one of my favourite brands.  With consistent good quality and original exciting scents, they are a firm favourite of mine.  You can imagine how pleased I was to receive a selection of samples from their new range Jardin d’Enfance

Appropriately enough, it did indeed remind me of the garden scents of my childhood.  Like many children of the 70s, I spent a lot of time outside picking flowers and, in a rather macabre fashion which cements my later years as an amateur goth, creating small cemeteries and floral tributes for the wildlife that our cat brought home.

Miller Harris Cassis en Feuille very much reminded me of the smell I used to get on my hands after crushing a fern or between my fingers.  It is an earthy, green smell which is almost astringent in its freshness. Add to that the unmistakeable smell of tomato leaf and the Cassia leaf ( which can so nearly veer into cat pee territory but doesn’t) and Miller Harris hits the mark.

At first spray, this is predominantly fruity, but not in a playful strawberry sundae way, more a squashed blackberries in a mud pie way.  This is delightful and has all the ingredients of a real garden, rather than a watercolour garden or a storybook garden, and it brings to mind brambles rather than fruit cocktail.  Phew! So far so good.  The blackcurrant top notes are zingy and fresh, but always surrounded with damp greenery.

After a while this phases into an almost spicy rose/geranium, and the geranium seems an especially good fit with tomato leaf.

The base notes are long lasting and muskier, but still with those dark blackish berries and the wet leafy-ness.  All in all, this captures a slightly wet British Garden on a long past summer’s day. I felt very connected to it and it took me right back to the days when I wasn’t worrying about damp proof courses and tax codes. Now that’s got to worth buying a bottle for!

My sample was kindly provided by Miller Harris.  Opinions are my own.

Stockists

The Miller Harris Jardin D’Enfance range is available from the Miller Harris website, or instore, or from one of their stockists- see this list. You can also buy the Miller Harris range from Escentual, John Lewisand Harrods to name but a few.