About Middleshade
Middleshade is a small perfumery on a working lavender farm in Kinross-shire.
The first lavender went into the ground in 2015 - a field that had previously grown arable cereals, a diversification project as much as anything. By 2017 we were distilling our own oil, and the perfumery grew out of having more lavender than we knew what to do with.
Who are we?
Rory studied physics at Oxford before coming back to run the farm. His route from physics (and, briefly, law) into agriculture and aromatic chemistry was the subject of an Oxford alumni profile, We Can Do Our Part to Restore the Landscape.
Marina is a plant geneticist, originally from Friuli Venezia-Giulia in Italy. She trained at the John Innes Centre and spent two years researching at ETH Zurich before joining the farm and the perfumery.
Neither of us set out to make perfume. We got there because the lavender harvest gave us more essential oil than we could sell on its own, and the question of what to do with it became more interesting than we expected.
The Farm
The farm is in rural Kinross-shire - a mosaic of lavender fields, wildflower meadows, young woodland, and botanical plots. Alongside the lavender we grow a range of complementary aromatic plants - mints, sage, chamomile - that find their way into the perfumes.
How we work the land matters to us. Soil care, biodiversity, pollinator habitat. The farm is also Scotland's only commercial lavender farm - there are a few smaller plantings, mostly closer to gardens than commercial operations, but nothing else at this scale.
The farm has its own website (link below) if you want to read more about the agricultural side of what we do, or arrange a visit.
Languages
The Middleshade website is available in English, Scots, and Gaelic - the three languages of the country we work in.
How we make the perfumes
Some of our scents lean heavily on what we grow. Scottish Lavender most obviously. Others use it more lightly, alongside ingredients we source from suppliers we've worked with for years. Oud doesn't grow this far north, nor do roses at any commercial scale. We grow what we can here in Scotland.
Everything is blended and bottled by hand, in small batches, in the farm workshop, and shipped from the farm.
