Linden
Linden is an intoxicatingly gorgeous, honeyed white floral fragrance from creamy yellow tree blossoms that are beloved by butterflies, hummingbirds and humans alike. Air & Weather’s Linden is an uplifting and serene floral perfume that features top notes of of warm neroli and linden with heart notes of honey and tuberose set in a base of light woods and a balsamic resin.
It’s a luxurious fragrance that can easily be worn throughout the day. Carefully blended to create a subtle and sophisticated scent that captures the scent of fresh linden blooms. Try it today for a truly unique scent! Scroll onward to view the the story behind the inspiration...
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The story...
The inspiration for this fragrance came from my hurrying through the storied Stuyvesant Square Park in Manhattan one afternoon at the very end of June, when random city streets are awash with the heady fragrance of blooming linden. On impulse, I pinched a set of blossoms to see if I could find a way to bottle the scent as closely as possible to the original bloom. For me, linden is perfectly beautiful as it is and fleeting.
What amazes me is how this singular flower serves as a link that threads through all the marvelous history of this city into the present day. In 1747, the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus sent his student Pehr Kalm on a journey through the North American Colonies to inventory its flora and fauna. Kalm reported that during his visit to New York City, he observed large countryside and farming estates surrounded by rolling lawns, fruit trees, stately elms, water beech trees and…lime trees. Interestingly, Linneaus’ own father adopted his surname from a lime tree (called “lind” in Swedish) that stood on their family farm.
Stuyvesant Square Park is named for the last Dutch director-general of the New Netherlands colony, Peter Stuyvesant, who once owned it as one small part of his 62-acres of farmland during the 17th century. In 1836, his great-great grandson, Peter Gerard Stuyvesant bequeathed the four-acre plot to the City of New York for use as a public park.
Throughout the following decades, this park’s linden flowers carried their heady fragrance past the nose of the city’s Gilded Age financier J.P. Morgan, who attended St. George’s Episcopal Church just west of the park, and to those of its nearby, illustrious residents, which included Atlantic Monthly editor William Dean Howells, who fostered the writing careers of Leo Tolstoy, Émile Zola, Stephen Crane and Emily Dickinson; George Palmer Putnam, the publishing magnate of Putnam’s Sons who produced books by Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, William Cullen Bryant and James Fenimore Cooper. Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer O. Henry also lived nearby and likely sat inside the park beneath the linden trees, inhaling its fragrance while eavesdropping on various passersby for inspiration before he headed off to Healy’s Pub (now Pete’s Tavern) to write.
Author Caleb Carr has his sleuthing psychiatrist character Dr. Laszlo Kreizler of The Alienist fame residing in a townhouse just north of the park on 17th Street. In real life, the great Czech composer Antonín Dvořák once lived near the eastern part of the park on E. 17th Street with his family when he started writing his New World Symphony. And, in the 80s, a very young Madonna lived in the 17th Street Hotel, a few steps away.
Development of this fragrance required much diligence and patience, because the window for capturing the scent of the actual live bloom of Tilia cordata is but a couple brief weeks in duration, and in 2019, the blossoms had only started to unfurl when a solid week of monsoon-like rains brutally washed them all away. I had no option but to wait until the following year to have another chance to inhale more fresh blooms, which served as reference for finally reformulating the fragrance to my satisfaction, which I am pleased to offer here for your enjoyment.
May it inspire you to create your own legendary presence.