AFTERIMAGE GARDEN is Every garden I have ever loved. The wild roses of my childhood, the overgrown plum tree of my allotment, the dog-roses we planted when I moved to Denmark, arrive in a single moment when the right scent reaches me.
My parents had a garden that I thought was the whole world. Wild rose bushes baked in the sun, blackcurrant heavy on the branch in late summer, the particular green smell of things growing faster than you could keep up with. I spent hours in it without any purpose other than being there.
Inside the greenhouse, I grew a mandarin tree. I was a child and it was mine completely, I watered it, I watched it, I worried about it through the cold months.
As I grew up, gardens kept finding me. A small raised bed by a canal. Then an allotment with a plum tree so old and overgrown it felt like it had been there before the garden existed heavy with fruit in August, the scent of split damson sweet and almost fermented in the heat. Exotic lilies I planted because I couldn't help myself. Carnations that came back every year without being asked.
Then I fell in love and moved to Denmark. The first thing we bought for our new garden was a pair of wild dog-roses. They grow everywhere along the Danish coast, completely ordinary to everyone who grew up here. But for me the first time they bloomed and that smell reached me, that particular wild rose smell, green and sweet and slightly sharp I was somewhere else entirely. Every garden I had ever loved arrived at once.
That is what AFTERIMAGE GARDEN is about. Not one garden but all of them, layered the way memory layers. Mandarin and blackcurrant at the top, bright, immediate, the greenhouse and the summer bushes of childhood. Carnation, lily and rose through the heart, slowly, the way flowers actually open. At the base, sandalwood and amber and cedarwood settle in warm and unhurried.