Diane St Clair’s Frost smells like love, earth, and patience. Like wearing other scents made by Diane, I am back in a garden where I was happy. Paused, alive, aware.

I was never a fast moving child–except when I was on a horse–but my grandparents taught me the value of absolute stillness. It’s a lesson I’m still grateful for, as I sat last night within an arm’s length of two fox cubs and their mother.

They never told me to go and play instead of reading, but let me read outside with a glass of homemade elderflower cordial while they were digging or tying up bean plants. Or I’d perch with my book on the slatted shelves of the potting shed, while Grandad carefully pinched out each tomato plant, or split seedlings with infinite care into fibrous pots for later planting.

Frost reminds me of those long days spent in their garden, lying unmoving along the well-mulched flowerbeds under the honeysuckle, reading, or waiting. Granny told me that there were fairies in the garden. Even at four, I knew that was bollocks, but nevertheless, I watched and found the real magic: the shiny insects and the butterflies, the nesting birds, the small furry things that push through the plants, and the bouquets of fascinating smells. Grandad didn’t need to make up stories, he knew that plants and animals were enough.

I always knew that both my grandfathers were good men because all dogs liked them, and they liked all dogs. This one taught me to love cricket (watch on television but listen on the radio), challenge assumptions, nurture plants from seed, and pretend to ignore wild creatures enough that they would come close to you. Bliss was going fishing, and sitting by the lake with him and the dogs in companionable silence.

I loved my grandmother too. She may have cooked every vegetable to a pulp, but always had an egg cup of washing up liquid to add to my bath, let me use her fancy powder puffs, read me Greek myths as bedtime stories, taught me words like antirrhinum, and sent me to the library when she couldn’t answer one of my endless questions.

Their spidery, open-windowed house was always a refuge: calm, warm, and full of unspoken love. They had loved each other since they were teenagers, and married ten years later, on a summer day in 1931. I found a pencilled postcard asking her out when she was still at school, scandalous photos of them in bathing suits together, abroad in the mid 20s. When Grandad died unexpectedly, Granny’s world stopped. For two years she was frozen. And then she remembered she was an adventurer and went on holiday, aged 80, to Russia. Two years later, she had a broken arm –she had fallen out of the apple tree Grandad had grown from a pip, reluctant to let the birds get all the top fruit– but was off again travelling, somewhere, until extreme old age grounded her entirely and she could only look out of the window at a new garden he hadn’t grown.

She would have loved Frost as much as I do, and the lifetime of love and gardens and closeness to the earth that it contains. I am grateful for the sample, and will be buying a bottle so I can wear it again and again. Because even without these memories, it is beautiful, thoughtful, moving.

originally posted 10 July 2019. I have emptied two bottles of Frost since this post.