Bowling Green (1986)
by Geoffrey Beene

My favorite of the inexpensive green fragrances. Excellent citrus opening with some spiciness cardamom, lavender, and just a hint of pine. I would of course like to smell more pine and fir, but still, this is a true gem of a fragrance. Multiple back up bottles are definitely in order! I compared this to Pino Silvestre a while back and Bowling Green is infinitely more enjoyable to me. Pino Silvestre smells so much like a kitchen spice cabinet that it's just not my thing...but Bowling Green definitely is my thing! Two thumbs way up!

Very nice.
Bowling Green is a decent, soapy pine that is refreshing.
Begins with a light lemon and quickly the scent transforms to the great outdoors. Think of a breezy autumn or spring day. That's what Bowling Green evokes to my nose. I favor this where some younger might find it too old school for their taste.

Oh, this put an enormous smile on my face. Bowling Green opens with an exuberant, effervescent lemon-citrus, which opens over a burst of ebullient greenery. It's a bit like stepping out into the middle of a golf course on a sunny summer morning. As the joyous opening fades, the fragrance matures into a verdant masculine, as though you're moving from grass fields into shadier woods.

It's crisp and elegant--a gentlemanly fragrance--but there's nothing stodgy about this. It's a shame it's been discontinued, because a fragrance this unique deserves success.

Bowling Green (EA version). Boy, this was a rude awakening at first. But I think I love it now. I really dig the initial massive assault of citrusses with the stem-like leafy greens. Then came the hollow EA-housenote of wet cardboard, and I thought 'oh no, here we go again...' but luckily that lasted only for a minute tops, and now I don't even notice it anymore.
The beauty is in the drydown and final stage. You get an aromatic-floral-woody aroma with the moss, citrus, sandalwood and everything good, with a subdued cinnamon appropriately lingering underneath it all, juuust enough to sense it. Now and then I get an '84 Lacoste-like whiff.
Performance is slightly above average, allthough I 'overspray' to make it last even longer and to really take in that citrus 'n' green onslaught.
Oh and the next day, your shirt smells incredible too...

Given the numerous approving reviews, I was initially baffled by this scent. On my skin it opens brutally with a very sharp, juicy lemon spread over resinous, synthetic pine. The effect is not one of freshness, but of bilious chemical sourness, like a 75 cent "Lemon Fresh" pine-tree-shaped car air freshener, or to move to an automotive metaphor that better suggests the scent's funky recesses, like the interior of an elderly man's musty Buick that's been parked in the hot sun after a cheap detailing job left the seats damp with some sort of lemony cleaning product. As the newly-mopped-floor intensity of the opening wanes, the notes don't quickly evolve; it's lemon and foul pine, well into the second quarter.

But, things change. The pine-lemon cleanser eventually stops screaming and recedes, and a soft, unexpected and beguiling duo of patchouli and sandalwood comes in, gently offsetting what remains of those stiff initial notes. The scent improves astonishingly, and evokes in me a memory of an inexpensive Chinese Sandalwood fan I had as a kid that I loved to sniff and that never lost its faint, beautiful smell. Remarkably, after its truly painful beginning, Bowling Green becomes something understated, and rather charming.