Night Blooms, India

Breathe in the night air of an Indian garden at dusk, where the day's heat softens into stone, jasmine flowers open and pomegranates ripen on the trees. Night Blooms is a heady floral spicy amber fragrance: warm, complex, built around the moment the air begins to glow.

Liquor-like pomegranate, red berries and pink peppercorn open it bright and deep; jasmine sambac, clove and plum carry the heart, ceremonial and sensuous; patchouli, vanilla, cedar, musk and sandalwood give it depth and lasting presence. The scent of a garden at evening, when the heat lifts and the night air blooms.

Top notes: Pomegranate, Red Berries, Pink Peppercorn

Heart notes: Jasmine Sambac, Clove, Plum

Base notes: Patchouli, Vanilla, Cedar, Musk, Sandalwood

A carved sandstone pavilion in India at dusk, jasmine climbing its arches and a single lamp reflected in the water below.

The place

My grandparents' home in India smelled a particular way. Warm, specific, layered with things I could not have named as a child but have spent years trying to articulate since. There was always fragrance in the air, always something blooming in the garden, always the presence of two people who had built something beautiful together and knew it.

My grandmother had a brilliant mind. She held a Masters in mathematics, had been a headmistress, and brought the same precision to everything she turned her attention to, including her home. The rooms were filled with shimmering chandeliers, intricately woven carpets, antiques chosen with real knowledge. Nothing was accidental. Nothing was merely decorative. She had an eye for beauty that was also an eye for quality, and the two things were, to her, the same.

There was a dressing table in my grandmother's room. In one of its drawers she kept her perfumes, and that drawer had a smell of its own: warm, complex, the accumulated impression of every bottle inside it. Each one had been chosen by my grandfather. Each one was a love letter written in scent.

She wore pearls. Large, creamy triple skeins, and in every knot between every pearl was her perfume. Jewellery was also a love language between my grandparents: the pearls, the perfume, each one chosen and given with intention, over years. Whenever I see pearls now, I think of her immediately and completely.

My grandfather was kind in a way that made people feel genuinely seen. Not the performed kindness of someone working at it, but the quiet, unconsidered generosity of someone for whom it was simply the natural way to be. I remember the sensation of my small hand in his. His fingers were long, and his hand was warm and steady, and holding it felt like safety in the most complete sense. Sandalwood and cedar anchor the base of the fragrance, and I feel no other woods encompass it in quite the same way. Dark, warm, slightly shadowed. That quality lives in the base of Night Blooms.

My grandmother grew roses. There was also a magnolia tree in her garden, and it bloomed with the kind of abundance that looks almost implausible. She tended both with care and, I suspect, considerable opinion about how they ought to be doing.

At the dining table she cut fruit. She did it with a precision that made even that feel considered. She would cut pomegranate, and I would steal the seeds, one by one: those small ruby gems that stain everything and taste extraordinary.

The pomegranate in Night Blooms, India is that memory. Directly, specifically, entirely. It opens the fragrance because it opened the experience of being with her.

A Night Blooms, India diffuser and candle on purple and gold silk beside an oil lamp, jasmine flowers and a bundle of old letters.

The fragrance

Composed by CPL Aromas.

Night Blooms was created with the perfumers at CPL Aromas, one of the largest and most respected fragrance houses in the world. We came to them with something we already understood, a scent we knew in our bones, and asked them to help us build it.

Most fragrance briefs begin with notes. We began with a place. Not India in any general sense, but one specific home: the warmth and ceremony of one family's house, as experienced by a child who was completely at ease there. We described the rooms, the perfume drawer, the garden, the table. We gave them the atmosphere and asked them to find the scent inside it.

The pomegranate was the anchor. It opens the fragrance because it opened the experience of being with my grandmother, the fruit cut at the table, the seeds stolen one by one. Red berries and pink peppercorn sit alongside it, the peppercorn giving a brightness that stops the fruit from turning sweet. At the heart, jasmine sambac, the jasmine of temples and warm evenings, heady and deep, with clove and plum beside it in a combination that feels ceremonial and sensuous at once.

The base was the part I cared about most. Sandalwood and cedar anchor it, and I feel no other woods encompass it in quite the same way. Patchouli, vanilla and musk hold everything together, warm and enveloping and lasting. It is the dark, slightly shadowed warmth of the house itself, the teak and the temple carvings, the feeling of a place built with care by two people who loved beauty in equal measure.

A fragrance that arrives, and stays.

Close-up of Kerry Lemon's hand-drawn Night Blooms illustration on the porcelain: a pair of budgies, a peacock, paisley and temple silhouettes.

The illustration

Hand-drawn illustration on porcelain by Kerry Lemon.

We needed an illustrator who could draw memory. Kerry Lemon is one of the most respected illustrators in the UK. She very rarely takes on commissions now. This one, she said, was too good to turn down.

The brief for Night Blooms was specific. Every motif had to mean something. Each element had to belong to this home, this memory.

The pomegranate splits open across the porcelain, the fruit cut at the table, the seeds I stole one by one. Jasmine climbs the vessel as it climbed the warm evenings, the heart of the fragrance made visible. The paisley winds between them, drawn from the sumptuous textiles of India, the kind kept in my grandmother's scented wardrobe and carrying her perfume in every fold.

A peacock opens its feathers. As a small child, in the gardens of the old club, I once stood completely still while one displayed directly in front of me, a performance meant only for me, and I kept the fallen feathers afterwards in a box of cherished things. The temple silhouettes belong to the same world, the architecture of the place, drawn from the carvings that lived in my grandparents' rooms.

The budgies are a pair, and they are there for my grandparents, for the love they had for each other. Devoted, constant, never quite themselves apart. Kerry drew them as a pair because that is how I remember the two of them, and the whole vessel, in that sense, is a portrait.

A Night Blooms, India candle refill with its tag beside the pink printed cotton pouch and a handwritten note on linen.

Made to be refilled

A Told London candle is made to be kept. The porcelain is yours for life: when the wax is spent you refill it rather than replace it, so the vessel stays in your home instead of being remade and shipped again. Each candle is hand-poured in England in natural soy wax, and the packaging is plastic-free and FSC-certified. Refill, don’t replace.