LAVENDER FARMING

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22628, 16 January 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

LAVENDER FARMING

# POPULAR F*OR WOMEN There comes a day when lavender seems to burst suddenly into full bloom, when the acres of a lavender farm turn from a misty blue-grey cloud to a waving sea of sweetness —mauve and shadowy blue deepening into purple. That is the day when the first lavender is cut for market and the hawkers wait to buy the big sheaves which they carefully divide into hundreds of bunches and sell in the towns. After the hawkers are served with the early crop, the lavender is allowed to stand in the fields for another week or two in order that the oil pods may be fully developed and the late crop left to ripen for the perfume makers. Years ago, when lavender scent was practically the only perfume used, both by the fine ladies in the towns and the busy ones in the country, too, a lavender farmer could make as much as four or five hundred pounds on his harvest —and £SOO was a very great deal of money in those days. Then, as ' a lule, the late crops were sold as they stood, the scent manufacturers cutting and afterwards carting the flowers to their distilleries. Kifty pounds weight of good lavender Howers, after they had been stripped from the stalks, would yield from ]4 to 16 ounces of the essential oil, which was used for the best perfume and for the basis of lavender water. When i called the other day at a lavender farm in Sussex run by two women, I found fields, usually stripped at this time of the year, still covered with unplucked bushes of thick lavender, wrote an English correspondent in September. This summer the women farmers have bad to be content to cut it in small quantities whenever the weather has been dry enough for the work. One large, greenhouse was redolent with the sweet fragrance of the flower, for the first lavender lay drying there in large wooden boxes, every box covered with paper. Apart from the tons of lavender grown on lavender farms, a real English country garden is rarely seen without a lavender hedge or a Invender walk, and full use is made of the purple spikes which now drench the air with sweetness.