LAVENDER HEDGES POPULAR IN OLD ENGLISH GARDENS

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 48, 12 March 1937, Page 14

LAVENDER HEDGES POPULAR IN OLD ENGLISH GARDENS

There comes a day when lavender seems to burst suddenly into full bloom, when the acres of a lavender farm turn from a misty hlue-grey cloud to a waving sea of sweetness — mauve and shadowy blue deepening into purple. That is the day when tho first lavender is cut for market and the hawkers wait to bay the big sheaves which they carefully divide into hundreds of bunehes 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 ween 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 praetically the only perfume used, both by the hue ladies in the towns and the busy ones in the coantry, too, a lavender farmer could make as much as £400 or £500 on his harvest — and £500 was a very great deal of money m those days. Then, as a rule, the. late ctops were sold as they stood, ihe scept manufacturers cutting and afterwards carting tne flowers to their distilleries. • Fifty pounds weight of good lavender flowers, after they had b'een s'tripped from the stalks, woiuld yield from 14 to.16 ounces of tho essential oil, which was used for the best perfume and for the basis of lavender water. "When X cailed 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 had 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 lavender walk, and full nse is made of the purple spikes which now drench the air with sweetness.