Bringing in the blue

I'm driving through the tiny village of St. Michel l'Observatoire at dusk when a wave of perfume rolls through my open window. The next second, accompanied by a throaty roar, a tractor lumbers around the corner, pulling a wagon piled teeteringly high with bunches of lavender. I wedge my car right up against the walls of the village houses on my right to make room for the fragrant caravan. It smells so good I'd like to do a U-turn just to keep that aroma blowing across my face--so fresh, sweet but sharp and aromatic at the same time--that blend of aromatic molecules spelling out the intoxicating aroma of lavender. The ex-Indiana girl buried inside me thinks, Hay wagons never smelled this good.


By late July, the fields of lavender around our house in Haute Provence are starting to fade to lavender gray, as the final florets on all those spiky flowers breathe their last. This is the time to harvest the lavender, the moment when the level of essential oils in the plant peaks before evaporating away to nothing by the time of seed formation.

Harvesting lavender is an ancient tradition in our region of Haute Provence. In the 1300s, wild lavender was already being gathered, dried, and sold by the itinerant herboristes of Lure Mountain, the peak that I see from my bedroom window. At our altitude (about 750 meters) and above, only true lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) grows wild and is cultivated. At elevations below us, spike lavender (Lavandula latifolia) grows wild, and also forms spontaneous hybrids with true lavender. One of them, dubbed Lavandin, is the lavender cultivated at elevations under 600 meters.


True lavender has a finer fragrance, and its essential oil is higher in antibiotic and other medical properties. The plant is shorter and more delicate in appearance than that of lavandin. Lavandin, on the other hand, yields more essential oil but of lower quality. Lavandin oil is destined for "industrial" use such as the scenting of soaps and other products. Lavandin is also easier to machine harvest because of its long stems.

But we're in true lavender country, where the deep blue of the lavender grows in patchwork with the soft mauve of clary sage (photo left) on our high plateaus. Under the intense July sun, the aromas of these two plants--the intensely resinous scent of the clary sage and the sharp, fresh fragrance of lavender--rise in heady waves off the fields and perfume the air for miles around.

In fact, it's only since the since the mid 1700s that lavender has been cultivated on an agricultural scale in France. At that time, a fad for perfumed gloves seized the country. A sizable glove-making industry existed in the town of Grasse, and its members began demanding such large quantities of lavender flowers from the gatherers of Haute Provence that people began experimenting with growing the plant. The rest, as they say, is history--at least, the history of one of the major totems of Provence. And, while perfumed leather gloves are no longer the rage, the demand for lavender lives on--a fortunate thing for the farmers in our area. No other plant of commercial value is as supremely adapted to our rocky soil, arid climate, and relatively cold winters as lavender.


Up until the early 1900s, lavender was cut by hand, with a specially adapted short curved scythe. (I can still buy this tool at my local hardware store in Forcalquier.) But French engineering genius has created a special tractor-pulled harvester that cuts the lavender in neat arcs. However, once that mechanical harvest is over, things pretty much revert to the 18th century. The cut lavender is gathered into twine-tied bundles that are left on top of the shorn plants to dry in the sun for several days. Then they are hand-pitched onto enormous wagons of the sort I encountered at the beginning of my story.
Notice how the pretty blue color has already faded by the time the lavender is harvested for oil extraction. After several days spent drying in the sun, the lavender is ready to be distilled. Only the biggest farmers have their own distilleries. The others are banded together into cooperatives, and it is the cooperative that invests in a distillation facility that serves all its member farmers. Not 2 miles from our house is the lavender distillery belonging to L'Occitane de Provence, the plant-based cosmetics producer with a store near you.

One day in late July, I stumbled on a farmer distiller as I was following my GPS through the hills south of Nyons.


Above a field of young lavender in bloom, I saw a building with smoke and steam rising from it at the same time. A pervasive but invisible cloud of perfume hanging in the air drew me as surely as a vagrant butterfly. I did a U-turn to check it out.

Under the roof of the hangar, a wagon piled high with bunches of dried lavender was being unloaded, bunch by bunch, by a worker pitching them directly down into the vat of the lavender "still." This scene reminded me of its analogue in the rural Midwest, where you see farmers pitching bales of hay. Meanwhile, another worker, perched on the still, arranged and packed the lavender in its vat.

Lavender essential oil has always--and is still--extracted by simple steam distillation. In the most rudimentary still, lavender is boiled with water, the rising vapor is trapped and then cooled, condensing out the essential oil, which is collected, along with an aqueous fraction called hydrolat, in a small tank called the essencier. But, because the people of Provence are naturally frugal, tradition has it that the heat for this distillation process is provided by burning lavender straw that has already been distilled. So that this straw doesn't become sodden, most stills have a separating grill between the boiling water below and the lavender above. You know, kind of like your vegetable steamer at home.

Once the vat is full of lavender, the worker will swing over that concrete-filled tire, lower it, and use it to tamp down the bunches of lavender until they are tightly packed. This will ensure that the maximum amount of material will be extracted in that run (and for that expenditure of energy). The extraction cycle takes from 1 to 3 hours. A centrifuge is then used to separate the essential oil from the hydrolat.  Or, in simpler operations, the oil is simply decanted off.

A small fraction of the essential oil of true lavender produced in Haute Provence has earned AOC (Appelation d'Origine Controlée), just like a fine French wine or cheese. (The lavender being processed in the photos is actually lavandin.) This oil is produced in a narrowly defined geographic zone (ours) and according to very strict standards. It is so precious--meaning rare and expensive--that nearly all of it is bought immediately by fine perfume makers. If ever you should come across a tiny flacon of essential oil of lavenderlabeled "AOC," don't hesitate to pay its steep price. It is the finest essential oil of lavender in the world.

After extraction, the lavender hay is tossed aside to dry (left) and fuel the furnace for further extractions, bringing the cycle full circle. (In the background of this photo are the steamer grills that are used to suspend the lavender above the hot water during the steam extraction process.)

But not all the hay gets burned. I've spotted a location on the outskirts of Banon where huge windrows of it are stockpiled. No one seems to be doing anything with it, as the piles just keep getting longer year after year. Perhaps they are the byproduct of a more modern distillery that is fueled by gas. Anyway, you know what I'm thinking. I'm thinking: my garden mulched with lavender hay. Organic matter is scarce in our arid Haute Provence. And anyway, just how Provençal-gardening would that be--a lavender-mulched potager!

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Products of Interest:

French lavender
Martin de Candre lavender-mint shaving soap
Martin de Candre eau de toilette--Lavender