It started with a gift I couldn't stop buying.

Every Christmas, I'd drive to a little candle maker in the interior of BC and come home with arms full of candles. Year after year. They were the one thing I never forgot on my list. The scent of the forest, wrapped up in a jar. One year I realized I'd bought so many that I thought, maybe I should try making my own.

So I did. And the first batches were terrible. I used fragrance oils like everyone recommends, but something was off. They smelled like the idea of a forest. Sweet, chemical, close but not right. Not like actually standing in one.

My partner and I spend every free weekend we have out in the backcountry. Backpacking, trail running, sleeping under trees on Vancouver Island. We know what the forest actually smells like. The cedar after rain, the fir sap on your fingers, the cold morning air through the pines. We wanted that.

The day I switched to essential oils, everything changed. I lit the first one and just stood there. It wasn't close to the woods, it was the woods. Real cedarwood. Real fir needle. Real Scotch pine. That was the moment Woodland became something more than a hobby.