The lavender room

Its beauty, its origins, its history — the varieties, the fields, the pictures.

Where it comes from

True lavender — Lavandula angustifolia — is native to the western Mediterranean, and it found its spiritual home on the high limestone plateaus of Provence: Sault, Valensole, the Drôme. For centuries it grew wild on the hillsides before anyone thought to plant it in the long purple rows we now photograph. It was gathered for its oil, prized by the Romans, who scented their baths with it — the name itself comes from the Latin lavare, “to wash.”

True lavender vs lavandin

Most of those vast, uniform fields you see on postcards are not true lavender at all — they are lavandin, a vigorous hybrid of true lavender and spike lavender. Lavandin is hardier, yields far more oil, and grows in big rounded bushes; it is what scents most soaps and cleaning products. True fine lavender is smaller, grows higher up the mountain, and gives a softer, sweeter, more medicinal oil — the one perfumers prize. The easy tell in the field: true lavender grows in loose, irregular clumps; lavandin in tidy, identical mounds.

When the fields bloom

If you ever want to see it: the Provençal lavender flowers from roughly late June through July, and the harvest runs into August, the bees working the rows in a haze. Valensole and the Sault plateau are the great sights. Go at dawn, before the heat and the crowds — it is the closest a field of flowers comes to the sea.

And that is the lavender room. Now, back to the olives.