A story about scent, migration, and what we give back to ourselves
Somewhere in my memory there is a girl of nine standing among the roses. She keeps herself half-hidden behind the bush, her face pressed into the flowers. In the background walks her neighbour’s dog — a large, dark shepherd she is terrified of. And still she stands there. Because her neighbour’s roses are more beautiful than the ones in her own garden. And the scent pulls harder than the fear.
That girl was me. And without knowing it, that afternoon I learned something that would shape my relationship with the world for the rest of my life: that scent is stronger than fear. That some longings carry you to places where your mind says you don’t belong.
The first garden
I grew up in the 1980s, in a world without phones, without internet, without screens demanding our attention. What there was, was outside. And outside was, above all, scent.
We had a large garden of our own, full of fruit and vegetables. But it was my neighbour’s garden that called to me. There grew roses that smelled deeper than any other flower I knew — pink, heavy, almost dark in their scent. I learned a trick that, back then, belonged only to me: I would pull tiny petals from the roses and tuck them into my nostrils. Not for a moment — for the whole day. I walked through the entire neighbourhood with roses in my nose, breathing in deeply, and the world was mine.
What I didn’t know then: I was doing exactly what perfumers have done for thousands of years. Not visiting a scent, but wearing it. Pinning a fleeting moment to your own body so it can travel with you through the day.
Among those roses, and behind the bush where the dog wouldn’t come, my first garden was born. Not a garden of plants, but the garden inside me — an inner space where scent, danger, beauty and childhood all lived together.
The second garden
In 2000 I left the country where I was born. Since then I have lived in the Netherlands. What surprised me was not what I missed — that I had expected. What surprised me was what I discovered here: scents I didn’t even know existed came drifting, suddenly, into my life.
The Dutch lilac smells unlike any lilac I had ever smelled before. Fuller, cooler, with a trace of rain in it. The fresh bread from the bakery I cycle past on my way to work, filling the street early with a scent that does not call but invites. And — most surprising of all — tea. Black tea especially, with lemon. I did not know, when I arrived here, that I would love the scent of tea so much. That is something the Netherlands taught me about myself, not the other way around.
This is the quiet truth of moving that migrants rarely speak aloud: your new country does not replace the old one. It multiplies you. Some parts of who you are you only discover once your old life lies behind you — because your old surroundings simply had no room for them.
My first two perfume purchases in the Netherlands — I remember them exactly — were not Dutch flowers, not sober classics. They were two niche perfumes by the French perfumer Serge Lutens. Jeux de Peau smelled, to me, of fresh bread laid over my grandmother’s butter. No marketing copy, no catalogue — a morning in a kitchen that only I still know. Chergui was different: in it I smelled hay and an evening fire. Not the desert the perfume is named after, but dry grass that has lain in the sun all day long, and somewhere a fire smouldering as the light goes.
I bought a perfume that was a morning at my grandmother’s. And a perfume that was an evening somewhere long ago. Only much later did I understand what I had been doing without realising it: I was building scent-bridges between my old life and my new one. Not to hold on to what I had left behind, but to make a place where both worlds could exist side by side.
And so my second garden came into being: a built, chosen garden of more than three hundred perfumes. Not a garden of blood or history, but of choice. A garden I had planted myself, bottle by bottle.
The scent that disappeared
In the spring of 2020, COVID broke out in the hospital where I work. No one was vaccinated yet, and we only half understood the virus. One day I caught it — like so many healthcare workers in those weeks. At first nothing seemed wrong: I thought of a cold, of tiredness.
Until I stood in the kitchen, frying onions. And suddenly there was only fried onion. No other food, no coffee, no bread, no flowers on the table. The world had become one single smell. And that one smell — fried onion — I would keep smelling everywhere for the next six months. In my perfumes. In the shower water. In my children when I held them.
What no one sees when you lose your sense of smell is how much it costs to ask for it back. For six months I tried, every single day, to smell something — consciously, with concentration. And I paid for it: with headache-evenings, with a tiredness in a part of my head I hadn’t known existed. Smelling is not a passive act, I learned. It is work you do without noticing — until it becomes visible again.
What I didn’t know then, and read later in the research: I was not an exception. What I had is called parosmia — a distorted sense of smell in which familiar scents suddenly smell different, and often unpleasant (unlike phantosmia, where you smell a scent that isn’t there). Onion, garlic, coffee and roasted meat are among the most commonly reported triggers; my fried onion was, then, painfully representative. Parosmia often appears during the recovery phase, on average around three months after the infection — though this varies greatly from person to person. The mechanism begins with the supporting cells: the virus mainly attacks these caretaker cells around the olfactory nerve cells, not the nerve cells themselves, which is why smell falls away first. Parosmia probably arises afterwards, when the olfactory system “rewires” itself incompletely during recovery.
Science calls it a disorder. To me it felt like grief. A woman with more than three hundred perfumes in her cabinet who suddenly can smell nothing — that is a world growing smaller without the walls ever moving. My second garden fell silent. Halfway through, I nearly sold half my collection; I couldn’t look at it without feeling something I had no word for.
The return
Six months went by. Then, one morning, I sprayed a perfume that had stood untouched on a shelf for months: Gris Dior. And I smelled something. Not everything, not at once — a hint, an edge of what it had once been. But it was not fried onion. It was something of its own. Something of Gris Dior itself.
Goodness, I was overjoyed.
Since then, Gris Dior has been my number one. Not because it is scientifically the finest perfume ever made — that is an impossible claim — but because it was the first to come back. The first to say: your sensory world has not died for good. There is a way back. Bit by bit, more scents returned. Not all of them, not always in full depth. But enough to start building again.
The third garden
What I have slowly come to understand after COVID is this: a person does not have one garden in her life, but at least three.
The first garden is the one you grow up in. The scents you do not choose, that are simply there — a neighbour’s roses, fresh bread in a kitchen that isn’t yours but became your place. That garden you get for nothing, and you lose it inevitably: through time, through moving, through the simple reality that children grow up.
The second garden is the one you build when you begin again. For me, that was Dutch lilacs I couldn’t name at first, tea I didn’t know I would come to love, perfumes that had no Dutch ancestor but found a place of their own between two countries. A garden of choice, of courage, of the willingness to let in what you don’t yet know.
The third garden is the one you build again after you have lost something. For me, that was after COVID. For others it is after a divorce, a loss, an illness, a broken year. It is the garden you plant when you know that gardens can disappear — and you decide to plant anyway. Not because you have forgotten what was lost, but precisely because you remember it.
In my third garden there are fewer perfumes than in my second. But every bottle stands there for a reason. Gris Dior stands at the front. Jeux de Peau beside it — still fresh bread over my grandmother’s butter. Chergui too — still hay and an evening fire. The roses from my neighbour’s garden are there as well, in a different way, in other bottles, in other languages.
Among perfume lovers there is one question that is almost always hard: “What is your favourite scent?” Most collectors I know can name a top five at best. But for me, that question has become easy since 2020. Not because I don’t love the others, but because one perfume gave me something no other can say: you have not stopped smelling forever. Welcome back.
In closing
If you are reading this and you have lost something yourself — a feeling, an experience, an ability, a person, a scent — I want to tell you this: your garden has not died. It has changed. And the version you can build now — with what you know, with what you have survived, with who you are today — is, in a way, richer than any version before it. Not because loss is beautiful, but because a garden planted after loss is a choice, and childhood scents never are.
The girl among the roses didn’t know it, standing there. But that afternoon she learned something that would prove true: scent is stronger than fear. Even when the fear is great. Even when the dog is dark and close. Even when everything you could once smell seems gone.
There is always a first scent that comes back. For me it was Gris Dior. What might it be for you?
Related reading
Sources & accountability
The personal memories in this story are mine. The scientific statements about smell loss and parosmia are based on the peer-reviewed sources below. This is not medical advice: if you struggle with smell loss or parosmia yourself, please discuss it with your GP.
- Brann DH, Tsukahara T, Weinreb C, et al. Non-neuronal expression of SARS-CoV-2 entry genes in the olfactory system suggests mechanisms underlying COVID-19-associated anosmia. Science Advances. 2020;6(31):eabc5801. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abc5801
- Walker A, Kelly C, Pottinger G, et al. Parosmia — a common consequence of covid-19. BMJ. 2022;377:e069860. doi:10.1136/bmj-2021-069860
- Parker JK, Kelly C, Gane S, et al. Insights into the molecular triggers of parosmia based on gas chromatography olfactometry. Communications Medicine. 2022;2(1). doi:10.1038/s43856-022-00112-9
- Karamali K, Elliott M, Hopkins C. COVID-19 related olfactory dysfunction. Current Opinion in Otolaryngology & Head and Neck Surgery. 2022;30(1):19–25. doi:10.1097/MOO.0000000000000783
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