Fig Tree • Fruit, Leaf and Wood

My wife loves figs. Not in a passing way, in a way where the fig tree at her family's summer place in the Cyprus mountains was half the reason she looked forward to going. 

You could just pick and eat them straight from the tree and there were always more than anyone could eat. After friends and neighbours came and filled their bags, the rest got made into jam, or dried in the sun. By the end of a summer everything smelled faintly of figs.

That's what this candle is holding onto.

Figs are a delicate fragrance to capture, because the fruit is only part of it. Stand near a fig tree and what you notice first is green and a little sharp, the leaves more than anything, with that milky note that gets on your hands if you snap a stem. The fruit is underneath that, soft and warm-smelling. And then there's that wood smell, which is what stays in the air longest.

Our Fig Tree candle moves through all three. It starts green and fresh, softens into the fruit, and settles on cedar and fig wood. It's the entire tree in a candle.

It's a Cyprus scent for us, tied up with childhood and long summers and that particular way a garden smells up in the mountains in August. But it's found its way home too. There are a few fig trees in the gardens around ours in Sussex, and come the end of summer they fruit and sweeten in the warm air as you walk past, and for a few weeks the street smells a little like the island. This candle sits in that gap.

We pour it by hand in small batches, with natural wax and a fragrance we took our time developing so it holds up from the first burn to the last. If you like it, Wild Thyme and Roses come from the same place, each built around somewhere that meant something to us.

If you've read this far, you probably care about how things are made. Alongside our own range, we work with a small number of shops and brands on private label and white label candles, and on custom scents developed from scratch. If that's you, get in touch and tell us what you have in mind.