I am an avid reader of different series in books. The ones that interest me the most are the ones where the author continually evolves their style while still using a cast of characters which return from installment to installment. I also like the authors who manage to make sure they release a new entry every year. San Francisco indie perfumer Ineke Ruhland has been the perfume equivalent of these literary series. As she has worked through the alphabet starting with “A” she has released one a year and like my books I have always looked forward to a new Ineke Perfume release sometime in the year; except for 2011. Now I wasn’t left wanting as she created four new fragrances for Anthropologie called Ineke’s Floral Curiosities Collection. I really liked them and Scarlet Larkspur became a fall staple for me. But this was like my favorite author writing a whole different series with different characters and I wanted the original object of my affection to return. Thankfully Ms. Ruhland told me in January I would be getting new releases for both series. Then she leaned towards me and told me that the next Ineke Perfume fragrance would be called Hothouse Flower and it would be a gardenia soliflore.

Gardenia holds a special place in my consciousness as my grandmother’s house was surrounded by gardenia bushes. My grandmother did not believe in that new-fangled air conditioning and used numerous ceiling fans to keep air moving through the open Florida Pine house. These fans would pick up the scent of the gardenias and spread them throughout the entire house. Bowls throughout the house carried a gardenia floating in water. Most of the time when a perfumer sits down to make a gardenia focused fragrance I think they often make two errors, both of intensity. My experience with gardenias is that yes they have a beautiful heady bouquet but I needed to get really close to get that almost narcotic level of sweet. More often that sweetness was encountered on the breeze and it is gentle and less obvious than one might think. The second is the green leaves and the woody nature of the bush itself are often over emphasized or worse left out altogether. For me the magic of the gardenia is the combination of the floral, green, and wood in a precise balance. Ms. Ruhland has attained that precision with her construction of Hothouse Flower.

One of the reasons I think I am drawn to Ms. Ruhland’s floral soliflores is she really spends time studying the real thing before sitting down to compose her perfume. Gilded Lily is an excellent example of how Ms. Ruhland can coax an unusual nuance from something you think you know well. Hothouse Flower benefits from her examination of gardenia in every setting she could find; gardens, florists, and yes hothouses. Ms. Ruhland chose to capture the dense humid milieu of the hothouse with the gardenia in full bloom. The thickness of the air encapsulates the floral, green, woody quality in its own kind of bubble and Hothouse Flower captures that bubble and puts it in a bottle.

Ms. Ruhland lets the leaves and the wood lead off the show as a leafy foliage accord is matched with the light woody aspect of cypress. Earl Grey tea is used to remind you that there is some earth around this olfactory plant. The heart of Hothouse Flower is where the floral facet of gardenia arrives and with the cypress and foliage accord it beckons you to come closer. As you do galbanum, leavened with fig, brings the green nature more forward. The base does the opposite as now, a very well-chosen, guaiacwood brings the woodiness forward and gardenia and guaiac make a perfect pair. A bit of musk and a reminder of the green, from a note called corn silk, bring Hothouse Flower to a close.

Hothouse Flower has average longevity and average sillage.

I may have waited for two years for “H” to arrive but it is one of the best fragrances Ms. Ruhland has done. She struck the perfect balance of my memory of what a gardenia bush smells like. I can almost hear my grandmother humming in her rocking chair on the porch.

Disclosure: This review was based on a preview sample provided by Ineke Perfume.

For those of you who would like to keep up with everything Ineke Perfume; they have a mailing list which you can join at this link here.

Thanks to Ineke Perfume we have two draw prizes. One is a full bottle of Hothouse Flower and the other is a deluxe sampler of all eight of the Alphabet Series fragrances. To be eligible to win leave a comment on which prize you would like to win. We will draw two winners on September 9, 2012.

We announce the winners only on site and on our Facebook page, so Like Cafleurebon and use our RSS option…or your dream prize will be just spilled perfume.

-Mark Behnke, Managing Editor