Crabtree & Evelyn is renowned around the world for beautiful gifts and everyday luxuries that capture the essence of English style. Distinctive and unique, this company has earned an outstanding reputation for its creative excellence and personal customer service.

Many people are curious about the name. Crabtree & Evelyn’s founder, Cyrus Harvey, was inspired by the Englishman, John Evelyn, whose love of nature and inventiveness is the basis of the brand’s philosophy today. During the 17th Century, Evelyn was famous as a landscape designer, conservationist and food writer. Evelyn is most famous for Sylva, the first important work on conservation, published at a time when England’s forests were being stripped of timber to build ships for the expanding British Navy.

His great estate, Sayes Court, was planted with large expanses of elm trees, and the magnificent gardens Evelyn created were a wonder of the age. The Diary of John Evelyn is a remarkable picture of 17th Century life, both in England and on the continent. He is also known for his writings on food – including a book on salads, in which he invented the first salad dressing made with olive oil.

John Evelyn’s inspiration enabled Crabtree & Evelyn to become one of the first lifestyle beauty companies to embrace the natural ingredient movement. Delicate flowers – lilies, roses, freesias and gardenias – create soft, sensual fragrances while time-tested extracts of herbs, fruits and plants – rosemary, comfrey, lavender, goatmilk, jojoba, aloe vera – care for the skin with their healing properties.

The Crabtree or Wild Apple symbol is native to Britain and the ancestor of all cultivated apple trees. It was highly prized for its beauty as well as its usefulness in home apothecary. Bartholomeus Anglicus whose encyclopaedia was one of the earliest printed books containing botanical information says, “Malus the Appyll tree is a grete tree in itself… gracious in syght and in taste and vertuous in medecyne.” (c.1470)

The Crabtree & Evelyn inspirational model is the early home apothecary, or ‘still room’ as it was called in England. Still rooms existed at a time when the garden played an integral role in daily life – a time when fresh flowers, herbs and fruits from the gardens and orchards were distilled to make fragrant waters for the bath and soothing essences for the skin. Fruit preserves were also created to brighten the winter larder. From the magic of the still room came the little luxuries and necessities that enhanced the quality of everyday life. This innovative spirit, built on the foundation of Crabtree & Evelyn’s rich heritage and relationship to the garden, inspires them today.

They believe that each age has its own wisdom to contribute to that body of knowledge they call ‘our heritage’, and continue to add to it. This unique relationship with and synergy between garden and nature’s bounty of benefits is something that they are diligent in preserving, at the same time.

Crabtree & Evelyn is available in more than 40 countries, with over 6,000 locations and 350 concept stores worldwide. Crabtree & Evelyn has eight stores in South Africa: Sandton City, Hyde Park, Design Quarter, Menlyn Park, Cavendish Square, La Lucia Mall, V&A Waterfront and Canal Walk.

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