The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Beatrix Jones Farrand was the only female founder of the American Society of Landscape Architects, designing gardens for college campuses, city parks, and the original Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden. Caswell-Massey named this fragrance for her. Created with Master Perfumer Laurent Le Guernec in 2018, Beatrix belongs to the Living Florals collection, meaning it wasn't composed from memory or imagination. It was derived directly from a heritage rose growing in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden. Bergamot opens. Blackcurrant and wild fig form the heart. Vetiver and musk anchor the base. A rose with dirt still on its hands.
The blackcurrant and wild fig at the heart of this composition aren't decorative. They're the garden speaking, its green, its texture, the smell of things that grow rather than things that are made. Vetiver adds an earthy, root-like quality that keeps the florals grounded instead of floating. Musk threads through the drydown, not adding sweetness but adding skin. The result is a rose that behaves like a rose: rooted, alive, specific. Not a universal rose. This rose.
The evolution
The bergamot opens crisp and citrus-bright, a familiar herald. Then the rose takes over completely. Not a synthetic recreation, the real flower, with blackcurrant and fig woven through it, adding a tart-green dimension that keeps it from being precious. Two hours in, the composition shifts. The florals settle, the fruitiness recedes, and what emerges is the vetiver, earthy, slightly smoky, the smell of roots instead of petals. The drydown holds close to skin. Moderate sillage throughout. Musk arrives last, soft and animal in the best sense. Six to eight hours total. What remains the next morning is vetiver's ghost, faint and grounded on fabric.
Cultural impact
Caswell-Massey's Living Florals collection represents a different approach to rose, one that prioritizes botanical accuracy over artistic interpretation. Beatrix is for the wearer who tends their own garden, or wishes they did. It's rose that earns its place. The collaboration with the New York Botanical Garden grounds it in living horticulture rather than perfumery convention.
