The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
The brief was simple and almost impossible to execute: translate a grandmother's garden in the Vietnamese countryside into a fragrance. Not a concept. An actual smell. Growing up, the garden's green scents and floral memories stayed with the founder through every transition, becoming the defining olfactory moments that couldn't be found elsewhere. When the opportunity arose to build something new, d'Annam was founded to fill that absence, and In The Garden became one of the first answers. Perfumer Anh Ngo worked from memory and from Vietnamese botanical specificity, not from a mood board. The goal wasn't elegance. It was recognition.
Rangoon Creeper is the note that makes this different. It's a tropical flower with a distinctive character that perfumers treasure for its versatility. In perfumery, it registers as something between jasmine and tuberose but with a rounder, almost honeyed quality that neither of those notes achieves alone. Used sparingly here, it amplifies the existing white florals without making the composition feel heavy.
The evolution
The opening hits clean. Petitgrain and neroli arrive together, citrus but not sharp, green but not bitter. The pear gives them sweetness without weight. Within ten minutes, the florals begin their takeover: jasmine first, then the tuberose swelling to fill what the citrus left behind. The transition isn't dramatic. The green notes fade gradually as the florals deepen, and by the thirty-minute mark you're standing in something almost entirely white and lush. The Rangoon Creeper shows up in the heart as a soft amplifier, it doesn't announce itself but you feel its presence in the way the floral becomes rounder, more enveloping. The drydown takes its time. The coconut and sandalwood arrive around the two-hour mark and gradually press the florals into the skin, where they become intimate and close rather than projecting.
Cultural impact
In The Garden arrived as a distinctive entry in contemporary fragrance, presenting white florals through a specific Vietnamese perspective. d'Annam brought that specificity to the table through Anh Ngo, a Vietnamese perfumer, rather than outsourcing the creative direction. The result is a white floral that doesn't try to smell like anyone else's garden.
