07.04.2026

Shady Garden, Behind the Story

Johanna Engvall is a writer and creative consultant with over 30 years of experience at the intersection of fashion and beauty. She has moved through every layer of the industry, from concept development to working both behind and in front of the camera, and ultimately through words. With the Shady Garden campaign, she turns her attention to how memory is preserved, how it fades.

Rooted in analogue processes, pressed botanicals, sun-developed cyanotypes, and Super 8 film, the project reflects her enduring fascination with what is fragile, fleeting, and slightly unstable. Flowers move beyond ornament; they become coded messengers of protection and poison, gift and shade.

“As a child, I was obsessed with images and words, lingering for hours over my mother’s Vogue. I was first photographed by a professional photographer at fourteen, and by seventeen, I had my first creative assignment, casting and assisting with styling for campaigns and shoots. My fascination with these crafts has been lifelong. Everything was analogue; advertisements lived on paper and billboards. I will always hold a deep affection for the tactile, unhurried nature of those processes. At the same time, I am intrigued by how this era of technology, when used as a tool, can expand access and create new platforms.”

Q: When did Shady Garden begin?

The Shady Garden chapter began long before the fragrance was developed. It started as a commission for Björk and berries, when I was asked to create a garden with the team, quite literally an urban courtyard garden defined by shadow. I named it Shady Garden. We carried that concept with us for years, waiting for the right moment to return to it. Eventually, a scent grew from that seed.

By the time I was invited to create the campaign, many of the scent note blooms were already out of season. So I found myself drawn to something quieter, slightly forgotten, touched by melancholy. A place where many spirits may have walked over the years, different life stories melting together.

I’m not entirely sure who the protagonist of Shady Garden is. Is it the spirits that have passed through the gate? The people who once inhabited the house? Or the garden itself and its flowers and plants, which seem to have their own agency.

A house also holds magic for me. When buildings are still and quiet, both inside and out, they come alive. The windows become eyes, reflecting the gardens, the skies, storms, and the seasons' passion.

And then there is the gate, which holds transformative power. When you step through it, something shifts. It becomes a refuge for the imagination, for projection, for anyone who dares to enter.

Q: There’s a duality in the campaign, beauty and danger. Why?

I believe we tend to romanticise plant life and nature, as if they were a refuge from everything happening in the world. However, we forget that both nature and human nature are volatile. There are beneficial plants, as well as toxic, noxious, and spellbinding ones.

This became my way of interpreting the fragrance notes: peony, violet, patchouli, arctic bramble, frankincense and amber. Each bears a Gift Spell and a Shade Spell, a blessing and a warning. Beauty and danger reside within the same bloom.

Q: How did seasonality influence the visuals?

It is almost never the right season for the plants you need when you are commissioned for a job, and this time was no different. At a market in Stockholm, I found the last peonies already slightly tired, their petals fading at the edges. The violets had finished blooming, and the arctic bramble was unripe.

So, I turned to my archives.

I keep pressed flowers from years ago. They are fragile now, veined and nearly translucent, their colours thinned by time. When I lift them, they feel the experiences of other summers. They carry memory in their fibres.

For the fresh flowers, I needed to work quickly. I pressed them and lightly painted them with acrylic to hold their shape between cyanotype paper and glass sheets. I placed the plants between glass and carried them into the sun, sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for forty-five, depending on the UV. I watched the image deepen.

It became part of the process to use what was available and let limitations shape form.

Once detached from the root, a flower begins its slow demise, the irony being that it is often more traditionally beautiful at this stage, when it is still in bloom. Anyway, some of the peonies started to decompose. Fine threads of mould spread across their petals, delicate and luminous; they came to life again through this process. Decay did not erase their beauty; it transformed it, becoming part of the artwork, shifting from preservation to transition.

Q: Why cyanotype and Super 8?

I grew up with Super 8 as the only way to capture moving images; VHS came later, and now we have digital cameras in our phones. But this type of film was physical, something you loaded and waited for.

Cyanotype works similarly, but here I use the sun as a collaborator. Exposure cannot be rushed; it depends on UV-light, patience, and chance. You can’t predict how an image will develop. Some of the dust particles on these prints are insects that paused on the glass and then became part of the artwork.
I wanted the campaign to feel handmade, analogue, slightly unstable, like memory itself.

From pressed flowers to sun-developed prints to Super 8 film, everything was built on older techniques. I am drawn to the silence of film. It flickers and still holds that visual narrative throughout, leaving more to the imagination.

The process involved several steps. Amber, frankincense, and seedpods, for example, are dense and sculptural, which makes them unsuitable for pressing directly onto cyanotype paper. Therefore, I first photographed them, then scanned the images onto transparent sheets to produce large negatives.

Using the same method as with the flowers, I exposed them to the sun. Afterwards, I washed the papers repeatedly in water, let them dry, and then pressed them again to flatten them enough to scan for the final images.

Q: Were there artistic influences?

I was deeply inspired by Hilma af Klint, particularly her spiritual paintings and book What Stands Behind the Flowers. In these works, she moves beyond scientific illustration and into something more metaphysical, visualising what she believed existed beneath the visible world.

Af Klint imagined this body of work as a kind of atlas, or, in botanical terms, a flora. But hers was a flora of the spirit. She placed representation and abstraction, observation and intuition, art and botany into dialogue. In her words, there was a connection between the plant world and the world of the soul.

Another source of inspiration was Karen Azoulay’s book Flowers and Their Meanings, which explores plants as characters.

There were literary references as well: Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and J. J. Grandville’s Les Fleurs Animées, both of which animate flowers with personality, symbolism, and moral complexity.

Q: And the voice in the campaign?

Because the visuals are abstract, I needed a narrator to anchor them. I wrote The Saga of Shady Garden and invited my friend Sophie Apollonia to read it. Her voice carries a human presence, yet it never clarifies who it is meant to represent. The ambiguity is deliberate; it is part of the garden’s nature.