From the Journal
Not all lavender is the same.
After twenty years with this plant, I still hear the same gentle mistake. We say lavender as if it were one thing. It never was.
People have talked about lavender for a very long time, and most of it starts from the same small misunderstanding. Lavender is a common name, and a common name tells you almost nothing about what is actually in your hand.
One name, a whole family
There are dozens of species in this family, and inside them more varieties and chemical types than most people ever imagine. The lavender I grow here is not the lavender of a field in France, and neither is the little plant on your windowsill. That is not a flaw in the plant. It is the whole beauty of it.
What the name remembers
I have always loved that the name carries its own history. Lavandula comes from an old word for washing, from all the baths and soaps it has quieted over the centuries. Angustifolia simply means narrow leaved. True lavender is the soft, sweet one most people picture. Lavandin is its brighter cousin, the one grown in great sweeping fields, and when it is raised in the right place its character comes surprisingly close.
There is no single lavender. There is only this lavender, grown in this place.
The word I borrowed from the vineyards
Almost everything I understand about this plant comes back to a word I borrowed from the winemakers all around me.
Terroir. A word first used for wine, and just as true of an essential oil. It is the way a place speaks through what it grows, the soil, the light, the wind, the water, and the season, all of it gathered into the scent of the oil. It is the reason one place, one farm matters, and the reason I can tell you exactly what is in a bottle.
Two lavenders of the same species, grown two valleys apart, can smell like two different plants. I have watched it happen in my own rows.
Why a scent can change how you feel
Here is the part that felt like magic to me long before I understood it. When you breathe lavender in, its molecules meet the receptors made to receive them, a key finding its lock, and the message goes straight to the limbic brain, the oldest part of you, where feeling and memory live, before a single thought has formed. I have always called that resonance. The right lavender meeting you, and you knowing it.
Calm, and clarity
So when someone asks me which lavender is best, I tell them the truth. There is no best.
“It is like fine art. There is no good piece or bad piece, only the one the eye loves. Wine is the same, and so is lavender. Not one better than another, only different, uniquely its own, and the beauty sits with the person who loves it.”
— Lila Avery-Fuson
True lavender tends to settle and soften you. Lavandin runs brighter and more awake. They are simply different keys, made for different moments of your day. Learning which one is in your hand is where a life with lavender really begins.
The right lavender, for the way you want to feel.
Calm · and Clarity · California Lavender Living™
This is education about the scent and character of lavender, drawn from botany and my own years with the plant. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is meant to diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.