I went looking for purity and found purpose.
Long before the farm, before any of it, there were the women who came before me. When the headaches came, and the nausea, and the heavy sadness my grandmother called the melancoli, my mother would reach for a small bottle of lavender oil, press it to my temples, and tell me to breathe. She had learned it at her own mother's side. That scent is my first memory of feeling well again.
So in 2005, when a serious health season brought me to my knees and the heavy treatments offered nothing but more suffering, my hands remembered what my mother's had taught me. I reached for lavender again, and the same sweet comfort that had carried the women before me began, slowly and gently, to give me back my own life.
I will always tell you the truth, so I will never call it a cure. I will only tell you what is real. This plant found me in my darkest season, and it stayed.
When I went searching for more of that true lavender, I found a world full of imposters. Bottles that wore her name and held none of her soul. It broke something in me. And then it made me a farmer.
A remedy as old as time.
I have come to believe I was never doing anything new. I was only answering a very old call.
Lavender has been tending to human sorrow for more than a thousand years. It perfumed the baths of Rome and the linens of queens. It lingers in the pages of the Bible. Its very name rises from the old word for washing, for cleansing, for making something pure again. Across every century, in every weary age, people have reached for this one tender plant to find their rest.
So when lavender met me at my lowest, it was not a discovery. It was an inheritance. A grace as old as time, handed down through countless hands before mine. All I did was open my own and say yes. And then I gave it the rest of my life.
Alchemy, in the truest sense.
There is an old and beautiful word for the work we do here. Alchemy.
Most people think of alchemy as the dream of turning lead into gold, but its truest meaning is far older and far gentler than that. It was the ancient art of transformation, the patient marriage of fire and water and time, coaxing something precious out of something plain. The first stills were built thousands of years ago, in Egypt and beyond, made to draw the very soul of a plant out into the light.
That is what happens in our fields and at our still. We take an ordinary armful of flowers, and with steam and patience and a great deal of love, we transform them into oil, into something far greater than the sum of its humble parts.
And no two distillers are ever quite the same. My husband and my father each came to the still with their own hand, their own touch, their own quiet patience. It is like a chef with a beloved recipe. The ingredients may match to the very letter, yet the soul of the thing shifts with the one who makes it. Every batch we have ever run carries the fingerprints of the hands that ran it.
We are alchemists in the oldest and truest sense. We are not chasing gold. We are practicing this ancient art for the only purpose it was ever meant to serve. Rest, and comfort, and calm.
We learned it side by side.
I did not arrive knowing how to do any of this. We learned it the way the oldest things are always learned, slowly, side by side, at the feet of living masters who had given their lives to the craft.
We learned distillation from Robert Seidel, the Guerilla Distiller, who has been coaxing oil from plants since the 1970s. We learned from Ann Harman, who teaches the Art of Distillation and wrote Harvest to Hydrosol. I studied aromatherapy and the delicate art of formulation under the beloved Jeanne Rose, who gave the world the very word hydrosol, and other generous teachers along the way. And I learned the chemistry of these precious oils from Dr. David Stewart, through his book, The Chemistry of Essential Oils Made Simple.
Somewhere along that quest, I felt called to study in earnest. In time I became a certified aromatherapist and formulator, so that my craft would always remain honest and wise, grounded in real knowledge as much as in love.
The rest, the deepest part, we learned the way every grower eventually must. Through time, and trial, and our own two hands, doing the work over and over until it lived in us.
Everything we make today still carries what these teachers so generously gave.
The Sunday phone call.
In the very beginning, when I was still only reading and dreaming, I came upon the name of a plant geneticist, Dr. Don Roberts. Something I cannot quite explain moved me to call the number I found. It was a Sunday. I never expected a soul to answer. He picked up on the very first ring.
We talked for an hour, perhaps longer, and it felt like coming home to a friend I had somehow known my whole life. He told me about the lavender varieties he had bred with his own hands, and how he had named each one for the people and the place he loved most. Miss Katherine, for his daughter. Sharon Roberts, for his wife. Buena Vista, for the road where he made his life.
We planted all three. English lavenders, every one, and they have bloomed in our fields ever since. A man's love for his family, rooted now in our soil, and carried gently into everything we make.
Grown from true stock.
Because my whole story was born of searching for something real, I have always tended carefully to where our plants begin.
I learned, in time, that the deception did not end with the oil. It reached all the way down into the plants themselves. True lavender cannot be grown from seed and trusted, for seed wanders and seldom comes back true. The only honest way is by cuttings, each one taken from a true mother plant, a faithful copy of the one before it. That very first year of planting taught me this the hard way, and we soon corrected our course. From that day on, we have planted only true mother stock, honest and true to type.
So much of that true mother stock came to us from my dear friend Sarah Bader, of Lavender at Stonegate, who wrote The Lavender Lover's Handbook, a book I am quietly proud to live inside the pages of. From her we received the true Grosso, that classic and generous lavandin, and Royal Velvet, which remains my own beloved favorite of them all. True to type. True to name. Everything it promises to be.
And when I long to go deeper still, I reach for the book I lovingly call my Lavender Bible. The Genus Lavandula, written by Tim Upson and Susyn Andrews for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. It is the most devoted account of this plant ever written, and I have worn my own copy soft with reading.
Born of pain, purpose, and passion.
My search for true lavender slowly became a calling.
In 2006, I planted the dream of Central Coast Lavender. In 2007, we set our first acre into the warm ground of Paso Robles. Over the years it grew to three acres of lavender on our seven-acre farm, with a distillery of our own, the first women-owned organic lavender farm in all of California. At our height we tended more than twenty thousand plants, and harvested two tons of lavender every single season.
And when the fields filled in and the lavender began to bloom, the bees found us. They came to buzz and dance among the rows, drunk on all that purple, so we welcomed them properly, with boxes of their own. Before long there was honey, one more gift freely given by nature, and it went straight into our products, sweet and golden and ours.
Organic was never a word on a label to me. It was the whole heart of the matter. I was laying this plant against my own tender skin, and I would never have grown it any other way.
And I did not do it alone. My father did it with me.
My father. The lavender father of our farm.
My dad was the lavender father of our farm.
He bought me my very first still, a small 7-liter tabletop thing, just big enough to learn our way upon. He rooted cuttings by hand beside me, thousands upon thousands of them. He had a farmer's hands and an inventor's restless mind. If a thing needed doing, he built the tool to do it. And if that tool did not yet exist, he simply dreamed it into being.
Together we chose three mother plants out of dozens, the strongest and the most fragrant and the most alive. Everything that grows on this farm today still traces home to those three. They are in their third generation now, the children of the children of the very plants my father and I knelt down and chose together.
The things my dad built.
You cannot truly know this farm without knowing the things my father made with his hands.
When the harvest needed gathering, he built a buggy from bicycle wheels off the Goodwill shelf and pine from his own shop, and he painted it purple, of course. It still rolls faithfully down the rows. When the cutting work grew cruel on our hands, he invented the Avery Jig to make it gentler and swifter, and word traveled until lavender farms all across the country came to use it, his idea blooming in fields he would never walk.
He built a bud shaker to free the buds, and a bud cleaner out of a miter saw motor, two window fans, and a length of hardware cloth. They worked then, and they work still.
And one summer, when a heat wave came for the baby plants too tender yet to bear that much sun, my father sat down with a needle and thread and hand-sewed a tiny umbrella for each one. A whole field of little umbrellas, made by a grown man who simply could not bear to watch them suffer.
He built the giant purple chair too, the one big enough to make you feel small and safe inside it. It is still here. People sit down in it, and something in their faces softens.
November 2020.
My father passed in November of 2020.
I walk these rows every single day, and he walks them still beside me, in spirit. His buggy is here. His jig lives on in fields all across the country. The still, the umbrellas, the great purple chair, the three mother plants and every plant that has come after. He is woven into all of it. When you hold something from this farm in your hands, you are holding something he helped build with his.
The next pair of hands.
My daughter planted her very first lavender here when she was only three years old.
Three generations of mother plants, and now my own girl, who once knelt in this same dirt with her small hands, is carrying our family's healing calling forward into medicine.
This gift was handed to me by my mother, and to her by hers. My grandmother left us in the late 1990s, and my mother in 2024. I carry them both with me down every row.
Caring for others is simply what this family does, whether by the plant or by the practice. The legacy reaches in both directions at once, backward and forward, and it is growing still.
I never kept it to myself.
Lavender carried me through, and I was never once tempted to keep it for myself alone.
In 2008, I founded the Central Coast Lavender Growers Association, the first lavender nonprofit in California, to help other growers tend this plant well. In 2009, we held the very first Central Coast Lavender Festival, and over 7,000 souls came through that first year, more than we ever dared imagine. It is still going strong today. And in 2012, I helped found the United States Lavender Growers Association, the first national lavender nonprofit in the country, where I am a founding member and the founding Vice President.
I have never walked away from any of it. With the national Association I have chaired and co-chaired committees through the years, from membership to education to research, and I am proud to call myself a member still. You do not let go of something like that. It is a child I helped bring into the world and helped raise, and it will be a part of my story and my heart for as long as I live. Rising tides lift us all. That has always been the heart of it, passing the purple torch to the next purple people and walking right beside them while they find their footing.
More than a product. A way of living.
What I have truly built here, in the end, is a way of living.
Everything I make is born of my own healing. The oils, the soaps, the salves, the bundles, the simple and sacred act of pausing to breathe. This is the quiet calm I once made for myself when my body most needed it, and now, at last, I get to place it gently into your hands.
Slower mornings. Deeper sleep. A home that smells like a field in full bloom. Small and daily grace, drawn from a plant that has been offering it freely for a thousand years. That is the world I would love to share with you.
And when you make this life your own, you become one of us. We call ourselves the purple people, and there will always be room for one more.
No lavender is better, only different.
It always makes me smile a little when someone says one lavender is better than another. To me that is like saying one painting is finer than another, or one wine, or one good olive oil.
I do not believe any lavender is better than the next. I believe they are simply different. Each one is shaped by its own climate and its own terroir, grown by different hands, gathered by different methods, and distilled in its own particular way. Every bottle is a small work of art.
And a work of art can only ever be truly loved by the one who sees it, and touches it, and feels it, and lets it move them. So I will never tell you ours is the finest. I only hope that when you find the lavender that speaks to your soul, you will know it.
Why this matters when you buy from us.
Every bottle, every bundle, every humble bar of soap began as a cutting we rooted by hand. It grew from three plants my father and I chose together. It was gathered on a buggy he built, cleaned by a machine he dreamed up, distilled by hand the way our masters taught us, and grown organic, because that is the only way I would ever trust to lay it against your skin.
This is the real and true lavender I once went searching for and could not find, so I grew it myself, with my own hands and my whole heart.
It gave me my life back. It is my deepest hope that it gives a little something back to you.
When you choose a bottle of lavender, you are choosing so much more than a scent. You are choosing who grew it, and how, and why. You are choosing the kind of life you wish to live beside it, and the lifestyle it carries to you. I have laid our whole story open here for one reason only. So that you may choose with your eyes, and your heart, wide open.
Come and find your favorite. Everything here was made with these two hands, and with his.
With love and lavender,
Lila