Lila came to lavender in search of purity, and found a passion that became her life's work. Her family homesteaded this part of the Central Coast in 1887, and her daughter is the seventh generation to call this ground home. This is a Mediterranean climate, the same that favors the vine and the olive, and she found her people among those growers, kindred in their patience and in the pressed and distilled things the land is made to give.

The plant had, in a hard season, saved her own life, and giving back to it shaped everything that came after. She founded the growers association here on the Central Coast in 2008 and helped start the national one in 2012, created a festival that has gathered the community each summer since 2009, and has mentored hundreds of growers and farms over nearly twenty years, from her own county to across the country, so the industry itself would grow.

Her father's hand is in the work as well. The harvest jig and buggy he built are still in use on lavender farms across the country, a quiet inheritance carried into every season. What the Academy teaches is what Lila has done herself, over twenty years, in her own garden and at her own still. The courses open when they are ready. For now, read what she has learned, and see what resonates.