The joyous lavender farmer

I'd been looking for fifty lavender plants to fill in various spots in my Provence garden.  So Denis and I spent a Saturday afternoon driving around visiting various nurseries, only to find the same thing everywhere:  nothing but lavandin.  Lavandin is a hybrid between Lavandula angustifolia (true or so-called "English [?!] lavender" and L. latifolia.)  French plant dogma in Provence has it that true lavender "won't grow" at altitudes below 1000 metres.  I've heard this from everyone--even from my sainted neighbor Jean-Claude, who of course is just repeating what "everyone" says.

When I hear this dictum, I want to scream in frustration.  I try to explain that I grew true lavender at less than 100 meters of altitude back in Indiana.  (I had a hard time doing it, but that was due to our wet winters and not to the lack of altitude.)  You can imagine just how much a nurseryman in Provence believes an Americano-Parisian proclaiming this heresy.  He either rolls his eyes or, more politely, looks off into the distance until I stop chattering.

Of course, the assertion that true lavender won't grow below 1000 m is patently absurd, as all around our Provence home (750 m), wild lavender grows like a weed.  The only reason I can imagine for this dogma's existence is that, given that we live smack dab in the middle of a lavender/lavandin growing region, perhaps essential oil content is lower in true lavender grown at lower altitudes.  And once the no-lavender-below-1000m rumor was born, it spread like wildfire.  The French are an especially rumor-prone people who will take rumor over a documented scientific tome anyday.

So, lavandin?  I wasn't having any of it.  Lavandin is an all-around coarser plant than true lavender.  And its fragrance can't hold a candle to the sweet but never cloying, bitingly pure scent of true lavender.  Lavandin's aroma is tainted by unpleasant camphoric elements.  That's why it's used in industry, while the essential oil of true lavender is destined only for perfumery and cosmetics.  Plus, lavandin's flowers are a greyish blue which can't compare to the pure lavender blue of true lavender.  And the final nail in the coffin of lavandin?  I already had about 200 thriving true lavender plants on my property, planted by yours truly!  So go preach about lavandin to the uninitiate, I felt like telling those trying to sell it to me.

Incredibly, while I lived in the middle of the world's biggest lavender producing area, I couldn't find any lavender plants to buy.  Frustrated, Denis and I turned the car's nose toward the village of Sault, the lavender capital of France.  At a gas station, Denis enquired of the owner if there wasn't a lavender producer nearby who would be willing to sell plants.  We knew that the plants are produced bareroot, for planting out in new fields in February and March.  This person kindly directed us to such a producer, and that's how we found ourselves meeting the joyous lavender farmer, Mr. Barjot.

We pulled up in the driveway of his farm, the Vallon des Lavandes, on a cloudy Sunday afternoon.  I was a little apprehensive, as I thought a request for 50 plants would be treated with derision by someone used to dealing in the thousands.  But a lean, gray-haired but young-faced man bounded up to our car, his smile radiant.  I explained my quest, and to forestall any irritating mention of the Rumor, I added that I already had numerous true lavenders thriving in my garden. 

To my pleasant surprise, Mr. Barjot assured me I could buy his plants, but that he hadn't yet uprooted them from the field.  Weather permitting, he planned to start doing so the following week.  We arranged to meet for the purchase in two weeks, which fell this past weekend.  The price?  €0.20 per plant.  I shook my head, wondering aloud to Denis after we left how anyone could make money producing lavender plants at that price.  We decided to buy a hundred plants, just to make it a little more worthwhile for Mr. Barjot.

Last Sunday found us once more at Mr. Barjot's farm.  He presented us with two feedsacks, each containing 50 neatly bundled plants.  When he pulled a plant out to show me, I was astounded at how husky it was.  This was a plant that, as a former nursery owner, I knew would require a one-gallon pot to accomodate it, were I to pot it up for sale.  Mr. Barjot showed me how to lightly trim the roots before planting, and to cover the crown of the plant, where new shoots were emerging, with about 2/3 of an inch of soil.  This beautiful plant had grown from a cutting stuck last year at this time, and had spent an entire year growing in the field.  And it was mine for 20 centimes.

The room where this transaction took place smelled so heavenly that we also bought several bottles of Mr. Barjot's essential oil of lavender.  When I asked him if he would have the time to show me a bit about how he propagates his lavender,  he led me to a field right next to the house.  On the left, he explained, were one-year-old plants such as the ones I had bought(photo above left), and on the right, freshly stuck cuttings (photo right).  Once the cuttings were prepared and stuck, Mr. Barjot and his family sifted superfine soil over them to facilitate rooting.  Then they handwatered all the cuttings to settle this soil firmly around them.  Regular irrigation afterward was assured by aspersion heads, which sprinkled the plants with a fine mist of water.  It was essential, explained Mr. Barjot, to water the crowns of the cuttings until their roots were established.  Without roots, they would rapidly dessicate otherwise.

All of this work is done by hand (note the rake in the photo).  One Barjot can stick about 400 cuttings per hour.  Sometimes, during the hand-watering phase, Mr. Barjot commented, your hand goes numb from holding the hose.  During their first year, the plantlets are also hand-weeded and cultivated.  Mr. Barjot was wreathed in smiles as he explained all this.  The uprooting of ready-to-set-out plants was likewise hand labor.

But you know, Mr. Barjot observed, you can also plant lavender from seed.  It sprouts very easily, once its hard seedcoat is cracked.  (Now listen up, gardeners, to this great tip from an expert.)  To crack the seedcoat, wrap your packet of seed in newspaper and place it in an airtight jar.  Then place the jar in the freezer and forget about it for a couple of weeks.  The newspaper, he explained in response to my query, was to allow the cold to penetrate the seeds slowly.  Too fast, and they would be damaged.  Once stratified as he had explained, the seeds sprout in only 3 days once planted.  But they need to be planted immediately after removal from the freezer!

We then proceeded to a conversation about pests of lavender.  There are many when it is grown in a field monoculture.  Two years ago, Mr. Barjot explained, when heavy spring rains came in on winds bearing Saharan sands, his fields were infested by an unknown caterpillar as big as his thumb.  They ate his plants down to dry sticks.  Other pests specialized in only eating the flowers, or in sucking all the plant's juices out.  There were also cryptogrammic diseases and worst of all, a virus.  While the Barjot farm is not strictly organic, he keeps chemical inputs to an absolute minimum and only applies them when traps show the presence of a pest in threatening numbers.

Because Denis and I are often horrified to notice tourists blithely picking bouquets of lavender flowers in local farmers' fields, we asked Mr. Barjot about theft.  He smiled a little less joyously.  "Well, the worst," he said, was when he drove up to one of his just-harvested fields one morning.  The cut lavender had been tied into bunches by a specially adapted agricultural machine, and was lying in the field to predry before distillation.  A couple of men had pulled their 4x4 into the field and were loading up the bunches.  When Mr. Barjot hailed them, they assured him not to worry, that they knew the owner and had his permission.

The smiling, gentle Mr. Barjot admitted that at that moment, he felt rage rising to his head.  "The owner," he told the men, "is standing in front of you talking to you.  Now, get out of here!"

That afternoon, I was planting Mr. Barjot's lavenders in front of our terrace and musing about him, lavender farmers in general, and the role of lavender in our Provençal landscape.  I thought about what an extraordinary form of farming it was, to have tamed the wild lavender of the hills and induced it to grow in fields, in order to be able to entice a living from these dry and rocky slopes.  Lavender farmers by nature are organic or nearly so; they don't like chemicals, maybe because they live so very close to the cycles of nature as the cultivate their lavender.  And their activity produces a beautiful symbiosis with beekeepers, who produce some of the world's best honey from all those billions of lavender flowers (or rather, their bees do).  Finally, while tourists flock to a place like the Grand Canyon to see Nature in all its ferocious, untamed beauty, they come to Provence to see the gentle traces of the hand of man on the landscape:  ancient stone villages, either still alive or in ruins; the quiet gurgle of a fountain guarding the precious contents of a spring; the persistence of stone terraces, or restanques, vestiges from a time when far more of the land was cultivated; ancient sheep barns laid in dry stone, their roofs still miraculously arching aloft as beautiful as churches; the occasional abandoned chapel perched high on a hill.  And ever, the gentle geometry of the lavender fields, brushing the hills into gray-green wide-wale corduroy in winter, blushing greener in spring, erupting into a riot of fragrant violet in summer.

But remember, if you visit, think of Mr. Barjot.  Please don't pick the (cultivated) lavender!

You can visit the Barjot farm and purchase his exquisite essential oil of lavender at Le Vallon des Lavandes.  Take the road direction Mont Ventoux heading north-northwest out of Sault.  Turn right at the sign for the farm, which is on the left about a kilometer down this road, again well marked with a sign.  Nearby, you can hike the Lavender Trail (Chemin des Lavandes) through the most spectacular lavender country in the world.

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