Central Coast Lavender
Paso Robles, California
Our Founder’s Story
I went looking for purity, and found purpose.
Long before the farm, there were the women who came before me. When the headaches came, and the heavy sadness my grandmother called the melancoli, my mother would press a small bottle of lavender oil to my temples and tell me to breathe. So in 2005, when a serious health season brought me to my knees, my hands remembered what hers had taught me — and lavender 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. 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
Lavender has been tending to human sorrow for more than a thousand years — the baths of Rome, the linens of queens. Its very name rises from the old word for washing, for making something pure again.
So when lavender met me at my lowest, it was not a discovery. It was an inheritance — a grace handed down through countless hands before mine. All I did was open my own and say yes.
Alchemy, in the truest sense
Alchemy is not the dream of turning lead into gold, but the ancient art of transformation — the patient marriage of fire and water and time.
We take an ordinary armful of flowers and, with steam and patience and love, transform them into something far greater than the sum of its parts. Every batch carries the fingerprints of the hands that ran it.
We learned it side by side
I did not arrive knowing how to do any of this. We learned it slowly, at the feet of living masters.
Distillation from Robert Seidel and Ann Harman; aromatherapy and formulation under the beloved Jeanne Rose; the chemistry of these oils from Dr. David Stewart. In time I became a certified aromatherapist and formulator, so my craft would always remain honest and wise.
The Sunday phone call
In the beginning, I came upon the name of a plant geneticist, Dr. Don Roberts, and something moved me to call. It was a Sunday. He picked up on the very first ring.
He told me about the lavender varieties he had bred and named for those he loved. We planted all three English lavenders, and they bloom in our fields still.
Grown from true stock
True lavender cannot be grown from seed and trusted. The only honest way is by cuttings, each taken from a true mother plant. From our first year on, we have planted only true mother stock.
So much of it came from my dear friend Sarah Bader of Lavender at Stonegate — the true Grosso, and Royal Velvet, still my own beloved favorite. True to type. True to name.
Born of pain, purpose, and passion
In 2006, I planted the dream of Central Coast Lavender. By 2007, our first acre went into the warm ground of Paso Robles — one of California’s early women-owned organic lavender farms, with more than twenty thousand plants at our height.
The bees found us, and so came honey, sweet and golden and ours. Organic was never a word on a label to me. It was the whole heart of the matter.
My father
My dad was the lavender father of our farm. He bought me my very first still and rooted cuttings by hand beside me, thousands upon thousands of them — a farmer’s hands and an inventor’s restless mind.
Together we chose three mother plants out of dozens. Everything that grows here today still traces home to those three.
The things my dad built
He built a harvest buggy from bicycle wheels and pine, and painted it purple, of course. He invented the Avery Jig, and word traveled until farms across the country came to use it.
One summer, when a heat wave came for the baby plants, he hand-sewed a tiny umbrella for each one. He built the giant purple chair too — the one big enough to make you feel small and safe inside it.
November 2020
My father passed in November of 2020.
I walk these rows every day, and he walks them still beside me, in spirit. His buggy is here; his jig lives on in fields across the country. He is woven into all of it. When you hold something from this farm, you are holding something he helped build.
The next pair of hands
My daughter planted her very first lavender here when she was only three years old.
Now my own girl is carrying our family’s healing calling forward into medicine. The legacy reaches in both directions at once, and it is growing still.
I never kept it to myself
In 2008, I founded the Central Coast Lavender Growers Association. In 2009, the first Central Coast Lavender Festival — over 7,000 souls that first year, and it is still going strong. In 2012, I helped found the United States Lavender Growers Association, where I am a founding member and founding Vice President.
Rising tides lift us all — passing the purple torch to the next purple people and walking right beside them.
More than a product. A way of living
What I have truly built here is a way of living — born of my own healing.
Slower mornings. Deeper sleep. A home that smells like a field in full bloom. 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 when someone says one lavender is better than another. Each is shaped by its own climate and terroir, grown by different hands, distilled in its own way.
Every bottle is a small work of art. 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 butter, every humble lavender sachet began as a cutting we rooted by hand. It grew from true mother-stock plants my father and I chose together, gathered on a buggy he built, and grown organic — the only way I would ever trust to lay it against your skin.
This is the real lavender I once went searching for and could not find, so I grew it myself. It gave me my life back. It is my deepest hope that it gives a little something back to you.
Come and find your favorite. Everything here was made with these two hands.
Lavender is our passion.
Helping build its American industry is our legacy.
Since 2006 · USLGA Founding Member · One of California’s Early Women-Owned Organic Lavender Farms
Organic by nature, rooted in purpose.
California Lavender Living™ · From field to bottle, from lavender to lifestyle.
Look for the little blue bottle 💙