* These items were gifted by I Love Cosmetics
There’s certain scents that immediately bring the current season to life, whether it’s cinnamon at Christmas, wet leaves in Autumn, freshly cut grass in Summer and for me what screams Spring is getting a whiff of Elderflower. In previous years we’ve been on holiday in France, luckily with the car, staying in quite a fancy hotel close to Lumbres in Northern France. The country lanes around the hotel were jam packed full of elderflowers in flower, so I had the bright idea that we should forage while we were there, and so we arrived home with a bagful of elderflowers ready to turn into our own elderflower fizz.
At times you have to feel sorry for MOH don’t you? Not too much, mind you…
We have our own elderflower plant in the garden, but it’s a plant that loves the sun and often it’s flowers sulk and face our neighbour’s garden. When we got back from Portugal this was all that was left of one of the few flowerheads that remained. I wasn’t going to get my Spring elderflower fix from that, now was I?
But luckily, this year I didn’t have to as I received a range of Elderflower Fizz products from I Love Cosmetics to try out. And after a day of gardening there’s nothing more welcoming than a hot and fragrant bath. On Sunday evening that’s just what happened, and it’s been a long, long while since I’ve had bath salts. They have a bit of an old-lady reputation don’t they? And they do remind me of my nan, who by very definition was an older lady. Hers were in square packages though and I remember being very strongly scented, these are quite different to those memories.
As well as the elderflower, there’s also jasmine, apple and cucumber. We’ve jasmine in our garden too, and I’ve written before about its heady scent and how a holiday in Seville, where I learnt that smell. The apple brings freshness and the cucumber its cooling properties, and for someone with an often missing ‘nose’ I’m pretty impressed with myself.
While my elderflower in the garden is sadly absent and my jasmine has yet to flower, we are enjoying another strong scent: the mock orange, or philadelphus. That too has its own scent story. It was in full flower on our wedding day, and we held our wedding reception in our garden with the tables for the sit down at the rear of the garden. Our table was next to the mock orange, and that’s when we learnt it’s one of the plants in our garden that makes MOH sneeze and wheeze, cue hayfever tablets for him!
It’s not just me though. I’ve placed the reed diffuser on our bookcase, replacing the one that has long lost its smell. After a day or so, MOH commented on the scent, not realising that I’d put the new one there. He was trying to place the scent, his words: fresh, summery and something he’d smelt before. He wasn’t wrong, he was probably recalling that car journey home from France!
He’s lucky, it wasn’t the one where the car smelt of goats cheese - but that’s a story for another day.
* These elderflower items were gifted by I Love Cosmetics to review here on my blog, as usual all views and opinions shared are my own.
