“Banana! Today, it’s banana,” Carole Biancalana declares, pressing a star-shaped bloom to her nose. A basket swings from her freckled forearm. Her hair is the colour of a wheat field.

From July to October, the flower grower’s land is speckled white with jasmine—these précieuses étoiles (precious stars) as she calls them. They appear every morning, as though fallen from the night sky. Thousands of flowers to collect—quickly, before the noon rays burn their fragrant wax. 

Sometimes, they smell sweet and sticky like apricot jam. Other times, after balmy summer nights, they give off indole; a sensual, almost animalistic compound. Today, it’s banana.

The harvest is then carried to the factory, where the notes of the day are captured in an absolute. It takes about 2,000 baskets-full of jasmine—more than 1,500 pounds—to produce a single litre.

Biancalana does this every day, just like her parents did when she was little, and her grandparents before that and her great-grandparents before them. Everything is done by hand. There is no machinery, no chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Nothing that could compromise the purest expression of the flowers.

She grew up with these flowers on the Domaine de Manon—though it wasn’t called that then—in Grasse. The verdant corridor, wedged between the Pre-Alp mountains and the Mediterranean, seemed destined to become the cradle of perfumery. Written in the stars, you might say—those in the sky and in the fields. But it actually happened out of necessity, as a way to mask the unpleasant smell of leather tanneries in the area in the 17th century. Eventually, the tanneries closed down and the flowers proliferated.

As a young girl, Biancalana learned the secrets of the most famous of these flowers: Grasse’s Rosa centifolia, a rose as bright as bubblegum. Her grandfather taught her to graft it onto wild rose bushes to make it more resistant and to bundle up its stems before the cold came. 

It was a quiet, tender childhood, but Biancalana had her sights set on the city. In her 20s, she moved to Cannes to become a banker. “I wanted to be a working girl,” she says. When her daughter Manon was born 24 years ago—“My grandmother was so happy, she renamed the domaine after her”—she found herself wishing she could give her the same kind of upbringing she had known. Food from the earth, big open spaces, fresh air… 

“I started to feel like the bank was suffocating me, like I couldn’t breathe. And then one day, I realized my real life wasn’t there; it was here, in the fields.” 

Her father waves from the meadow below. A cat sleeps under an olive tree. “Every morning when I drink my coffee and take in this view, I know I made the right decision.”

DiorAfter working as a banker, Carole Biancalana found her calling in the rose fields of Grasse in southern France.

That’s not to say it’s an easy life. She gets up before sunrise and spends hours in the heat or rain, but for a long time, the biggest struggle was the money. By the early 2000s, fewer and fewer fragrance houses were using real flowers, turning instead to synthetic extracts. That was the case of Dior before a certain François Demachy came along.

Demachy is also a child of Grasse. He, too, was raised around the fuchsia fields and knows that jasmine can sometimes smell like banana. His father ran a pharmacy in town where he sold his perfume, Eau de Grasse Impériale. After spending summers in local fragrance factories, Demachy became a perfumer himself, working for Chanel, Ungaro and Tiffany before joining Dior in 2006.

It was around this time that he met Biancalana at the World Perfumery Congress. She gave a presentation on Grasse’s flower crops in the hope of reigniting interest around them. He came up to her afterward and told her he liked the way she talked about her flowers. “He said he wanted to put them at the heart of his creation for Dior.” She’s been growing flowers for him ever since. 

“In terms of quality, Grasse flowers are the best,” says Demachy. He dips a blotter in a vial of rose absolute and gives it a sniff to confirm this. Grasse’s prized nectars, stored behind glass like jewels, line the shelves of his lab at Les Fontaines Parfumées (“the perfumed fountains”). The 17th-century perfumery, not too far from Domaine de Manon, was acquired by Dior’s parent company, LVMH, in 2013.

“Using these flowers is also a way of preserving the know-how: growing the flowers, transforming them into essences and absolutes,” he explains. “There’s not a lot that’s been put in writing; it’s mostly an oral tradition.”

In 2018, that tradition was added to UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list, which aims to safeguard knowledge and practices around the globe. Now, a new generation of flower farmers is keeping it alive. One of them is Émilie Carlo, a rosy-cheeked brunette who fell under Grasse’s spell a few years ago and now grows flowers exclusively for Dior. 

“I just had this feeling of immense peace here that I’d never experienced before. It was like I was finally where I was supposed to be.”

Carlo came to the area after completing a degree in agricultural studies. She was looking for herself, she says, unsure what her next move should be. “I just had this feeling of immense peace here that I’d never experienced before,” she says. “It was like I was finally where I was supposed to be.”

The May rose harvest was coming up, so she decided to apply to be a picker. She spent her days filling baskets with flowers and soon everything—her clothes, her skin—smelled like Rosa centifolia, a swirl of honey and cardamom. When she’d finally rest after a long day, she couldn’t wait to feel the softness of the petals on her fingers again. “I didn’t want to do anything but pick roses.” 

As the season came to an end, Carlo dreamt of a place where she could plant her own flowers. She heard about a patch of abandoned land where May roses had once grown, in nearby Callian. She nourished the soil and tended to the thorny bushes until they bloomed again. “It was exceptional for such ancient roses. It was like they’d been waiting for someone to come care for them this whole time.”

The roses turned out to be even more exceptional than she thought. As Carlo later found out, the land she was working on had once belonged to Catherine Dior, Christian’s baby sister. “I was having issues with my plants and some elders told me Catherine used to have the same problems.” 

Catherine Dior was a fascinating woman, a member of the French Resistance who was interned in a German concentration camp during World War II and awarded a slew of medals for her bravery. She later became one of the few women to be granted a government license as a Mandataire en fleurs coupées (a broker of cut flowers), which enabled her to sell flowers around the world. 

Most famously, though, she is Miss Dior, the one for whom Christian named his first-ever fragrance in 1947. Legend has it he had been brainstorming potential monikers when she entered his Avenue Montaigne atelier, prompting his advisor Mitzah Bricard to exclaim “Voilà, Miss Dior!” 

Getty ImagesDior’s Spring Summer 2020 collection paid homage to Catherine Dior’s love of gardening. The couturier’s sister found solace in flowers following the atrocities of the war.

Catherine’s spirit still inhabits the house today. Her love of gardening served as the inspiration for Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Spring 2020 show, where models sauntered down a dirt runway in rubber boots and straw-soled slides. Wildflower motifs climbed up skirts and dresses and frayed sun hats rested atop rustic braids. “After the horrors of the war, I think they were both in search of beauty—Christian found it in couture and Catherine in flowers and plants,” Chiuri told Vogue.

This spring, that beauty has been bottled in the latest Miss Dior fragrance. Rose N’Roses is a gift to rose lovers like Catherine. A near-gluttonous dose of it sparkles against a musky base, with bergamot adding a burst of freshness. It’s happy and effervescent and feels like a dewy morning in the South of France.

“I wanted to renew with that powerful feeling of nature, like when I was a child and first saw the fields of flowers blooming in May,” explains Demachy. “The rose, for me, is precisely that wonderment. I wanted to be as close to the flower as possible.”

Above all, the eau de toilette is a love letter to a place that’s soothed many souls, from Catherine Dior to Carole Biancalana and the new crop of producers like Émilie Carlo. “I always save the prettiest roses for Catherine and lay them at her grave,” says the latter. “Some Dior roses for Miss Dior.” 

DiorDior Miss Dior Rose N’Roses Eau de Toilette, $100 (50 mL), holtrenfrew.com

Travel and accommodations for Katherine Lalancette were provided by Dior. Dior did not review or approve this story.

 

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