Escape! to the great outdoors
A perfume from Saudi Arabia that evoked the country’s
landscape crystallised a business idea for Tauranga couple Serena and Harold
Jones – using scent to create a unique sense of place.
The result is Queenstown Natural Perfumiers, which debuted
its collection last year. “Our natural environment is New Zealand’s true
luxury. It’s totally amazing and often undervalued,” says Serena Jones, who has
studied botany and horticulture.
“Queenstown Lakes is among New Zealand’s finest landscapes
so we sought to find and express the region’s essential scents.”
After 2 years of research and development involving
professional perfumiers in New Zealand and France, the keen trampers and bush
walkers released four scents – Mountain Herbs, Wilderness Berries, Lakeland
Flora and High Country Tussock.
The perfumes will be available to sample at the Escape!
festival in Tauranga early next month as part of Scents of a Landscape on
Sunday, June 3 with Harold Jones, who is also a poet (AUP New Poets 4), and
award-winning novelist Laurence Fearnley, discussing the power of scent to
enhance feeling, awareness and memory.
Fearnley – who has been ‘scent mapping’ her Dunedin
neighbourhood for 2 years – also tutors a workshop in writing “beyond the visual”
on Saturday, June 2. She is working on a book of essays on scent and a novel
structured like a perfume with top notes, heart notes and base notes.
Also exploring the outdoors at Escape! is Geoff Chapple who
will take his audience from Cape Reinga to Bluff across the 3000km Te Araroa
Walkway of New Zealand on Friday, June 1.
Chapple, who took up the project when it became clear local
authorities would not, began mapping the North Island trail, talking to every
council and DoC conservancy on the route but in 1997 decided the only way to
whip up interest was to walk the trail and write as he went, using the
new-fangled internet and so becoming one of this country’s first bloggers.
His first national interview took place near Whangarei with
Radio NZ’s Kim Hill. “Listeners could hear a mad old woman cursing me – I only
had one hand on the cellphone for most of the interview in case I had to fend
her off.” Blog views went into the thousands.
“I was just about a vagabond,” Chapple recalls, “sleeping in
public toilets on wet nights. My family and I were made very poor by that
5-month tramp and I couldn’t have done it without the support of my wife
[Miriam Beatson].”
A $30,000 grant in 2002 enabled him to design and walk the
South Island trail – “and I suddenly had a credit card that worked”.
Te Araroa Walkway of New Zealand officially opened on
December 3, 2011 with Chapple’s guidebook published at the same time. After
standing down as the trust’s chief executive in 2012, Chapple received an ONZM.
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