The Almanac is where the plant is properly understood, where twenty years of field notes meet the long history that came before them.

Lavender is older than any of us, and better documented than most flowers. What follows is some of what we have gathered on the estate, and some of what was gathered long before it: the botany and the taxonomy, the origin and the age, the lore, and the two lavenders that grow here now.

The genus

Lavandula, and its many cousins

Lavender is a genus, not a single plant. Botanists place Lavandula in the Lamiaceae, the mint family, which is why the stems are square and the whole plant is aromatic. The most thorough modern account, Tim Upson and Susyn Andrews' The Genus Lavandula, recognises around thirty-nine species, sorted into three subgroups and several sections. The genus is native to a broad band of dry, sunlit country: the Atlantic islands, across the Mediterranean, through the Middle East, and as far as India. Despite the name, lavender is not native to England at all.

The plant

A woody shrub that keeps its scent in glass

Lavender is an evergreen woody subshrub, grey-green and low, built for heat and thin soil. Its flowers are not really single blooms but small whorls stacked into a spike, each held in a little cup called a calyx. The scent is not in the petals. It is held in glandular hairs, tiny oil glands that stud the leaves, stems, and calyces; brush the plant and you break a few of them, which is why lavender gives up its scent to the touch. Steam distillation does the same thing at scale, rupturing those glands so the oil can be gathered and cooled back to liquid. What it yields is a short list of principal molecules, chiefly linalool, linalyl acetate, camphor, and 1,8-cineole, and it is the proportion of these, more than anything, that tells one lavender from another.

A short history

A useful flower, before it was a luxury

The name is a clue. Lavender is thought to descend from the Latin lavare, to wash, and for most of its history that is exactly what it was for. The Romans scented their baths and their laundry with it and carried it through the empire. In the still-rooms of medieval monasteries it was grown by the row, strewn across floors, and folded among stored linens to keep them fresh and turn away moths. It followed the trade routes south to Provence and the wider Mediterranean, where the limestone, the dry heat, and the long light suited it as nowhere else had.

The oil came into its own later, when steam distillation offered a way to gather the flower's character into something that would keep. A copper alembic, a slow fire, and patience: the method has changed very little in centuries, and neither has the reason for it.

Lore & tradition

The habits of a plant people kept close

Every long-used plant collects stories, and lavender has more than most. It was carried for protection and for luck, laid at thresholds, and folded into the linens of a marriage bed. It marked the clean room and the cared-for house. Some of those old associations are folklore and belong to folklore; others are simply the record of a plant that people kept close because it made a home feel tended. We hold the lore lightly, and the plant closely.

The two we grow

L. angustifolia and L. × intermedia

Of the many species, two matter most here, and they sit close together in the classification. The first is Lavandula angustifolia, true lavender, the sweet high-altitude species of the western Mediterranean. It is the one grown and distilled so widely in English gardens that it took the name English lavender, though it never came from England. It is cold-hardy, blooms once, and runs low in camphor and generous in linalyl acetate, which is what makes it sweet.

The second is Lavandula × intermedia, or lavandin, and it is a hybrid: a natural cross between true lavender and its lowland cousin, spike lavender (L. latifolia). Where the two grow near each other, the bees make the cross themselves. The result is larger, taller, and far more generous in yield, but mostly sterile, so it is grown from cuttings rather than seed, every plant a clone of the last. The French one we grow is the cultivar 'Grosso', named for Pierre Grosso, the grower who selected it in Provence in the early 1970s after a wave of dieback had ruined the lavandin plantings of the day. 'Grosso' proved hardy and productive, and is now the most widely planted lavandin in the world. It is the working lavender, and it is ours.

What grows here is true Grosso, propagated in an unbroken line from that first selection. A great many American plantings sold under the name are something else, a later cross of a Provence lavender with the cultivar, near it in the field and apart from it in the glass. True Grosso stays true only where the lineage has been carried forward by hand, cutting from cutting, without interruption. Ours has been, and is kept that way on purpose.

They come from the same soil, the same still, and the same twenty years of care, and still they turn out to be entirely different characters. The whole of that difference is told in The Tale of Two Lavenders.

This estate's chapter

Twenty years of keeping it true

Everything here traces to mother stock kept true to type, propagated by hand, passed down from a mother plant that has given herself, generation after generation, from the mothers before her. One lineage. It is distilled slowly in a copper still on the family estate at Paso Robles. The Almanac is not finished, and was never meant to be. It is added to as the seasons turn.