Sweet Blooming Lavender

"Will you buy my sweet blooming lavender?
For there’s sixteen blue branches for one penny

 all in full bloom".

So there I was, pedalling along the rough track on my way towards Pirton, when out of the corner of my eye I saw an unfamiliar colour in the landscape - a field of lavender. I got the above shot with some difficulty and thought that I'd call in to the farm on my way back, knowing that they'd be open to the public by then.

Despite its exotic appearance and its association with warmer climes lavender does perfectly well in Britain and has been grown here for centuries. The little snippet of a song at the head of this post goes on as follows:

"Come all you young ladies you make no delay
I have Mitcham lavender around here today"

Mitcham? That's in London, isn't it? Well, it is now but when the song was written (presumably by someone selling lavender in the street) it was in the countryside and that part of Surrey was famous for growing it commercially. Not only that but it was reckoned by some to be the best lavender in the world.

"Come all you Painted Ladies", the song might have said; the butterflies of that name were out in force enjoying the fragrant flowers.

But what was all this lavender used for? Just about everything it seems.

The Romans put it in the water in which they bathed to make them smell sweeter; the name "lavender" apparently comes from the Latin lavare meaning to wash. The English surname Lavender comes from the old name for washer-woman (were there ever any washer-men?) and its earliest reference is one Cecilia La Lavendar who is recorded as living in Cambridgeshire in 1273.

When they had dried the washing they folded it and put it away with lavender to make it smell fresher. This gave rise to the phrase "laid up in lavender" which originally meant "to be presented in the best possible way". Somewhere along the line it changed to "laid out in lavender" which referred to the practice of laying out a corpse with lavender to disguise the smells of decomposition.

Hildegard of Bingen, when she wasn't composing liturgical airs and poems, liked to wash her hair in lavender to kill fleas and head lice. She also mixed lavender with brandy and gin to cure her migraines - not what one might expect from a twelfth century Abbess! Turner's New Herbal of the mid-sixteenth century says "...wyse men founde by experience that it was good to washe mennes heades with, which had any deceses therein". Meanwhile Elizabeth I is said to have enjoyed a preserve made from lavender.

The heyday of lavender production was the Victorian era when large amounts of lavender oil were distilled to be added to perfumes and soaps. The workers who harvested the crop in Mitcham and other places were paid very low wages despite the huge profits that were being made from the plant.

Nowadays tourism contributes greatly to the economy of the growers, with people willing to pay for the privilege of cutting a few sprigs to take home in a paper bag. There were certainly lots of visitors to the lavender fields at the weekend and there was something very notable about them....

Yes, many were visitors from Japan who seem to have heard about the attraction via the internet and come here in their hundreds. But there were also many others from the various ethnic groups who have moved to England in recent decades. It's very noticeable that many of these people do not often venture out into the countryside, so it's encouraging to find so many wading thigh-deep through the fields of lavender on a bright Saturday morning.

Take care.