Fragrance house

Lingua Planta

Lingua Planta is a Netherlands-based fragrance brand founded by conceptual designer Merle Bergers and launched in 2019 at Object Rotterdam, alongside the founding of her studio. It developed from Bergers’ Design Academy Eindhoven research and graduation project on plant volatile communication, a multidisciplinary work combining scent with sculpture, film, audio, and text. The brand treats scent as a form of plant communication and uses perfume to encourage attention to relationships between humans and other species. Its hand-blended, plant-based natural perfumes use materials selected, where possible, from regenerative, organic, wildcrafted, or waste-stream sources. The original fragrance concept grouped plant signals into Attract, Repel, and Defend, while the ongoing Field Notes program archives olfactory studies through limited-edition fragrances, field observations, and plant research. Tomato Leaf traces back to Bergers’ 2016 research and took seven years to develop. Lingua Planta’s creative work has also included Plant Fever and Understory at Dutch Design Week in 2023.