Understory Lingua Planta 2021

And with the ever warmer summers, we lived even deeper in the woods, hiding in undergrowth in the shades of baked lavender bushes, their needles shedding dark oily drops of bitter ferment-like resins. The first leaves were already on the ground, half-rotted from the last heavy rain, seeming to conceal individual pockets of embers smoldering smoky yarns. Mint worms cooled the hazy earth, which was spun through with gossamer-thin webs of roots, bright threads of glue trailing between the trees. Damp flakes of ash from distant fires whispered on the brittle mosses, which the cracking pines and the warm, damp clay wore like shaggy clothes. And which they spoke like sounds. We could stay here for these days.
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Merle Bergers from Lingua Planta, based in Utrecht in the Netherlands, uses only vegan and natural essential oils for her molecularly structured fragrances, which she produces by hand. Merle, who studied under Mandy Aftel among others, grew up in a small forest in the Netherlands where she was fascinated by the volatile substances with which plants communicated, hence the name “Lingua Planta”. For her, her fragrances are the aesthetic realization of scientific research into the language of plants.
With “Understory”, she thematically ventures into the earthy undergrowth, in which lavender bushes are clearly growing, as the fragrance opens very dark and oily, spicy-tart and herbaceous, as if the sun had baked and fermented the needles of the plant and released a concentrate from them. Also very dominant from the start is a very minty-spicy patchouly, leafy-earthy interspersed with violet leaf as well as rooty vetiver and bright, sharp adhesive threads of sandalwood. The oakmoss, which becomes more prominent in the base, is also very earthy, woody and rugged, so that the tonka bean mentioned on its side cannot smooth it out in my opinion. On the contrary: the spice seems smoky in places, as if it were finely interwoven with wood smoke and ash, presumably from the pine wood listed on their homepage. All in all, the words from the Unterwald are quite clear and of above-average length.

(With thanks to Olfarte)