Bowling Green (1986)
by Geoffrey Beene

Love the opening of amazing lemon and soapy lavender. It just feels great and wonderful to wear. The rest kinda peters out but lingers for quite sometime. I like the seamless transition from citrus top, green middle to the soapy mossy drydown. This is something to put on in the morning to wake up. Very energetic and I like it.

Bowling Green’s sunny, green herbaceous opening accord is the perfect olfactory expression of its name. The grassy notes recede only slightly with time, making way as they do for a succulent lemon that’s a dead ringer for the one that anchors the wonderful Monsieur Balmain. A warm, well-defined cardamom, soft lavender, and some bracing coniferous notes fill out the structure, and once these manifest themselves Bowling Green goes along on a steady, linear course for a couple of hours before shifting into a sandalwood-and-spice dominated drydown. Oddly transparent and “modern” smelling for something done in the mid ‘80s, and I’m sad to see it discontinued. On the plus side, It can still be found very cheaply, and is very much worth owning for fans of green and citrus fragrances.

The opening is gorgeously green with just the right hints of spice but as it progresses towards the drydown, all I got was sackloads of cardamom. I noticed Lavender, Jasmine and Artemisia listed in the heart notes but on my skin these florals were absent; overwhelmed no doubt by the rampaging spice notes. Perhaps the sultry weather is to blame. In any case I went home for a quick scrub before anyone mistook me for a sweaty "Spice Guy'.

A second wearing on a cooler day however brings a noticeably different dimension: it is a lot greener and the spices less rampant. I could also detect a fleeting powdery floral note before it gets chased away by the spice. As much as I like the masculine green opening, I can only give this a neutral. Certainly one of those scents that should come with a user's manual stating: "For use in COOL DRY WEATHER only."

I seem to remember an incarnation of this from the 1970s, but I must be dreaming. It goes on great, like gangbusters, but quickly goes much quieter. Still, it never backs away beyond detection until the very end. People classify this as a spicy scent, but I would call it spicy-green, since the spice seems to be there mostly to liven up the green bits. This is very pleasant to wear, especially in the daytime and in fine weather. The notes are the uplifting kind, so it works to sustain or create a good mood for me. I've seen the "drugstore" version of this, but I think the one I have must predate that, because it seems to retain the complexity I remember from the original.

I suspect the ingredients in the original version of Bowling Green may have been of a different caliber than in the low-end $9.99 product offered today at every discounter in the US. In any event, what I wore gave me little pleasure - an extreme blast of cheap soapiness that wore on for a good half hour, before evaporating into a decent but unexciting blend of herbs and spices. The high-end version of this, to me, appears to be Miller&Bertaux's No. 2 Spiritus/Land and I'll gladly pay the vastly higher price for the genuine pleasures it has to offer.

It is true that the very top notes have something in common with Drakkar Noir, but Bowling Green is, first and foremost, green. It's a slightly stilted name, but actually quite perfect when I think about it. The top is sharply citrusy and the base gets leafy with a little sweet spice: sort of an evolution from a vivid yellowish-green to a brown-tinged forest green. Just about every stage of it is pleasant and I don't think many people would find fault at all, which in and of itself is an accomplishment. I don't know why they discontinued it (or did they?); I think it may have been their best because it seems so much more universal in its appeal than Grey Flannel, and Eau de GF is cheap and dull. I feel like you could wear a big dose of this at the office (as I once did by accident) and be perfectly fine, or so my female coworker seemed to think.