The Smell of the Landscape

Designing a perfume for Mastenbroek, a late-medieval Dutch polder in the province of Overijssel where many cattle farmers make their homes and the horizon is a long way off: it’s not an obvious idea. Artist Birthe Leemeijer, 33, not only came up with it, she managed to get the perfume into stores. L’Essence de Mastenbroek was hailed in the German press as the first Dutch fragrance line.

She developed the scent in close collaboration with residents of the polder. "To get to know the region from the inside out, I spent two days with the Van der Vegte family," she says. "Marco van der Vegte, who’s a cattle farmer himself, introduced me to the minister, some local young people, and other farmers. Mastenbroek initially gave me the impression of being a closed community that didn’t make any effort to reach out, as farming businesses I knew of in (the province of) Zeeland did. There, they engage in all sorts of agritourism to lure people to the polder. (But) in response to my suggestion to search for the essence of Mastenbroek, we formed an ‘essence club’ of a diverse group of local residents."

The accord

Leemeijer brought pure fragrance samples, such as grass, hay, ditch and stable scents, to meetings of the essence club. The scents generated all kinds of conversational topics. "We talked about the smell of fresh-cut grass in a silo, the role of smells in the four seasons, the smell of shearing cows in the autumn," she says. "The residents also took pictures of their own daily surroundings. I collected all this information in an archive." Leemeijer approached the perfumer Alessandro Gualtieri with the archive, and together they put together an initial selection of scents, called an accord. Gualtieri made various compositions out of this, and Leemeijer presented them to the club. She and the members ultimately selected one blend as ‘the essence of Mastenbroek’.

For Leemeijer, it’s important that the way a work comes about forms a part of its meaning. To that end, she often works with large groups of people, and she says she feels most at home in the role of director. "For me, a museum is not always the ideal place to show my work, just as a closed studio is not the ideal place for me to realise it," Leemeijer says. "I’d rather develop it on location, together with others, preferably in such a way that the collaboration takes on meaning within the work itself." She embarked on one of her first such projects in the Amsterdamse Bos, the city’s recreational woods, sixty years after unemployed city residents had planted the forest. Leemeijer in turn invited jobless people to plant gardens there with her. In the work she sought to focus attention on the forest’s parklike, stylised character and to confront visitors with the population group that had planted it sixty years before.

Country air

A small quantity of L’Essence de Mastenbroek was produced in the perfume-making city of Grasse, France. A laboratory-glass factory in the Dutch town of Drachten made bottles to a design by Birthe Leemeijer. "The essence club’s meetings in Mastenbroek led to people expressing a desire to find somewhere that the scent and the place could come together," she says, "a place where the bottles would be filled and packed and owners of the perfume could come in for refills. This ultimately took shape in the form of a large glass tank containing more than twenty litres of perfume, called De Bron (‘the source’). It was brought in on a boat during the launch party for the perfume, and placed in the visitors’ centre beside the old steam-driven pumping station at the edge of the polder."

After the launch in Mastenbroek, Leemeijer wanted to bring the smell of the country into the city. She contacted the department store chain De Bijenkorf, which responded with immediate enthusiasm. The launch at the Amsterdam flagship store generated a wave of interest in the Netherlands as well as abroad. A Google search yields hits from all corners of the earth. "The scent is even being sold by Dutch people in Canada," Leemeijer says.

Every resident who leaves Mastenbroek to build a life somewhere else is given a bottle as a memento of this place where they’ve spent part of their life. Leemeijer herself wears L’Essence de Mastenbroek. "The fragrance not only calls forth associations you can immediately name, like the scents of hay, milk and cattle; it also tries to evoke an idea of space – a faraway horizon – and the sensation of a cold wind," she says. "But my favourite story, and the one that says the most, was about a woman who went to the launch in De Bijenkorf and when she got home her boyfriend asked her, "What did you do this afternoon, go and lie in a pasture?"