Heather honey, a ramekin of olive oil, cherry tomatoes on the vine…Susan Zelouf relishes the scents of an Irish summer and says there is a latent perfumer inside all of us …
Surviving the lean months of a Northern Hemisphere winter calls for a strategy. Our great-grandparents planned for scarcity by canning, preserving, drying, salting and pickling a windfall harvest. Prying open the tight lid of a Mason jar with a key sent them hurtling back in time, the heady scent of fruit and sugar a return to summer, when year-younger selves gathered berries in fields and hedgerows. “If time could run backward, like a film in reverse,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, “we would see this mess reassemble itself into lush green hills and moss-covered ledges of limestone. The streams would run back up the hills to the springs and the salt would stay glittering in underground rooms.” Now, perfumed produce awaits us year-round on stocked supermarket shelves: blood oranges from Sicily, Bing cherries grown in the Pacific Northwest, California black mission figs, French d’Anjou pears, a cornucopia paid for in food miles, buying us ample free time to plan vacations, holy-days away from the business of life, in which our only job is to remind ourselves how to do nothing.
While some of us choose to do nothing in faraway places, there is plenty of nothing to do right here at home. This morning, after a cup of freshly ground stovetop coffee brewed for ten minutes (perked long enough for the nutty, chocolatey aroma to waken us), we venture out in slippers to grab fistfuls of flowering rosemary, running the resinous needles through our fingers, cupping our hands over our noses and mouths to huff its camphoraceous greenness. Ireland is a country of 40 shades of green and 100,000 welcomes, its skies a muted palette of 50 shades of grey (the most common being Tupperware), yet the habitually undercounted characteristic of this island is the smell of the place. Travel brochures hype destinations based on Instagrammable vistas, but how to describe the clingy mossiness of a turf fire? Or the sticky moreishness of honeysuckle in flower, twined over shrubby hedges along the boreen? The milky sweet sour smell of silage from Brophy’s farmyard, like butter that’s off, but not in a bad way? How to extoll the virtues of slurry, which, considering it’s a mixture of gases produced by bacteria during the decomposition of animal waste, ought to smell, well, pretty shitty, and it does, but complex and nuanced, deliciously decayed, as whiffy as a white truffle. Consider a human’s olfaction, not as acute as a dog’s, unless one is blessed or cursed with hyperosmia, a heightened sense of smell. The olfactory system is not only a pleasure centre, crucial to determining what we should eat, who we should mate with, and how we nurture our young (the smell of a newborn triggering a rush of dopamine, the “feelgood” neurotransmitter, increasing its chances of survival) but scent acts as a red flag – where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.
Blindfolded, foraging, could you identify a beloved from a table set with bits and pieces pulled from a life? Seaweed, a woollen sweater, whitebait, a worn leather belt, wild mushrooms. Heather honey, a ramekin of olive oil, cherry tomatoes on the vine. Soap, bicycle grease, boxes of screws, hessian bags of feed, creosote fence posts. Balsamic, pomegranate, pineapple. There is a latent perfumer inside all of us, a tracker’s nose: this summer, don’t forgot to stop and smell the silage. @susanzelouf
1. I’M MARRYING amazement with a wedding band of pink flowers from www.lesnereides.com.
2. I’M SMUDGING my house with citrine, lavender, sage and rosemary bundles to invite wealth in. www.charliehaze.etsy.com.
3. I’M NOURISHING my curls with Gisou honey-infused hair oil, a natural humectant available at Brown Thomas.
4. I’M CROWNING myself Queen of Fecking Everything in a Dolce & Gabbana flower tiara. www.farfetch.com.
5. I’M BRIMMING with summer vibes in an embroidered raffia bucket hat by Chloé, from www.lyst.com.
6. I’M CARPETING my wall with a wild garlic print designed and made in the west of Ireland by www.superfolk.com.
7. I’M BLOSSOMING in BB Taylor’s Bumpy Night Posy Flower Bag. www.wolfandbadger.com/eu.
8. I’M CAMOUFLAGING in fields of flowers in Richard Quinn’s Roxy denim jacket. www.matchesfashion.com.
9. I’M SCRUBBING up nicely with the help of handmade lavender soap from www.kylemoreabbey.com.
10. I’M LEARNING how to do nothing and unplug, via artist and critic Jenny Odell’s guide to taking back our lives.
11. I’M STEPPING lightly in Bruno Frisoni’s artful My Tulip heels. Shop a selection at www.brunofrisoni.com.
12. I’M FRAMING Cliona Doyle’s Meadowsweet print, available from www.artsy.net
13. I’M CARRYING a torch for an old love, lit by a luxury soy candle with top notes of citrus, basil and oregano, a mysterious heart of algae, ambergris and patchouli, on a bed of crushed Irish moss. www.somasstudio.com.
14. I’M WASHING my hands with zero-waste Irish honeysuckle soap, to order from www.downtoearth.ie.
