A list of potential heart notes: wool, dust, oak, mince, daffodils, iris, lemon, oysters, the sea, roses, camphor, gorse, cigarette smoke, pumice, mud, ash, fern, lilac, sweat, ivy, whisky, wormwood, benzoin, paper, willow, corpse flower, kawakawa, horopito, tarata.

TOP NOTES

Notes of relocation: The fold-out table in my caravan isn’t big enough to display all my perfume oils. I still have all my scents but they’re stored in file boxes, securely stacked in the storage space beneath the back seat that converts into a double bed at night. The oils and tinctures I’m working with for my signature scent are close at hand, lined up neatly on a wooden board placed over the stove and sink top in front of me. I’ve simplified my original selection. I think the reduction of notes is a response to my new living arrangement but, more than that, I think that I see myself, now, as decluttered, a simpler version of my old self. My base notes are only three: oakmoss, benzoin and ambergris. The benzoin lifts the deep earthiness of the moss, adding light to the base. Ambergris joins the base notes, but I’m using it to represent the wool and lanolin of my beloved home, the place in my heart I will never abandon.

Much as I love the smell, I’ve dispensed with the notes of oats and gorse as they don’t work with the bitterness of my main heart notes: ivy and willow. Combined, oats and gorse would have created a smell reminiscent of a golden coconut biscuit newly baked in the oven. But, even though I’d like to draw on memory associations with my grandfather and his fried porridge, or my own passing fancy with being Gorse Woman, these notes don’t represent me and aren’t right for this perfume.

The heart notes of my signature scent are deep and dark, like a pool of still water in the bend of a river. Ivy and willow, one plant clinging and the other weeping; barely recognisable as perfume ingredients but I find myself drawn to them all the same. The leaves aren’t flashy, they don’t announce themselves, but they carry a sense of gravitas, for me at least.

Finally, the place in my perfume’s heart I haven’t yet filled. The space I’ve set aside for a new note, a ‘discovery’. I still have so much to learn, I need to look and feel and taste and sniff. I need to capture a sense of place, this place, not some land that lies across the ocean. Maybe I will go with tarata.

Its lemon note would lift the green of the ivy and willow and possibly provide a bridge to the fresher top notes. Tarata. I can recognise it now by its smell.

So now the top notes. The final addition to my perfume, the bursts of energy, my here and now, and the way ahead.