Deborah LawrensonInspire

Provencal Lavender – off the beaten track

When the lavender is harvested in Provence at the end of July, a heavenly scent is carried on warm evening breezes. Alerted by the first wafts of perfumed air, from our terrace we can sometimes see the smoke rising from the other side of a small ridge. The distillation has begun.

In the small purple fields woven into the landscape of the hills around the town of Apt in the Luberon, the stills are sometimes placed in the very fields where the flowers have been grown. In this part of Provence lavender farming is a far cry from the huge commercial concerns of Sault and Valensole, more like smallholdings tended in the traditional way.

lavender-fields-in-provence @deb_lawrenson

The lavender production that scents our summer sunsets is sold to a local co-operative, but a few kilometres further into the valley is the Distillerie Les Coulets, near the village of Rustrel. As you arrive down a narrow country track, time stands still, and you enter the world of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. Although Pagnol’s enduring stories were set further south towards the coast at Marseille, the same rural idyll really does seem to linger in every stone and corner.

Lavender in Provence @deb_lawrenson

An old still, once used to extract the essence from the lavender – or the hardier lavandin -flowers, stands proudly outside the farm. This is a tiny, family-run business: Christian Borde & Fils. The lavender is grown in the surrounding fields and brought to an unassuming barn for the magic of scent distillation to begin. I drew on the setting for this scene from my novel The Lantern, in which the perfumes of Provence are a sensory presence.

“The water in the still was bubbling merrily. At the table, one of the much older women known to us simply, namelessly, as Madame, was thrashing the head of a sheath against a box to break off and collect the flowers. Then with one deft sifting motion, she showered the ground with any remaining remnants of stalk and leaf and an even more intense cloud of lavender scent exploded into the warm air.”

At Les Coulets the modern alembic still is heated. Steam rises through the lavender flowers and is pushed up through the pipe that comes out of the top, and then down through the cooling cylinder full of cold water that coils round and round. At the end of the process, the resulting liquid contains the essence of the flower, its oil and scent.

Distillery Lavender in Provence @deb_lawrenson

With this essential oil, the Distillerie les Coulets makes different strengths of lavender preparations, from the pure essence which must be diluted – with almond oil, perhaps – before it comes into contact with the skin, to soothing massage oils that Madame Borde makes up and labels in her workshop, which is barely larger than a garden shed.

It’s a truly charming enterprise, and the resultant natural oils have a deep and sweet, almost honeyed aroma, a world away from synthetic mass-produced fragrances.

The other side of Apt, high up near Buoux in the imposing hills of the Grand Luberon, the lavender crop is gathered and distilled in the traditional way on much a larger scale at Les Agnels.

Distillery Lavender in Provence @deb_lawrenson

Sheaves of lavender – and lavandin – are brought from the fields all around to the steam vats in an open barn for the extraction process. After vaporisation, the droplets of scented oil are used to make soaps and shampoos and shower gel. The dried flowers are also used in traditional lavender bags of Provenҫal fabric to scent drawers and wardrobes.

In The Lantern, my fictional perfume and soap-maker Madame Musset was a herbalist too, with a knowledge of the medicinal properties of natural oils. And here at Les Agnels, you can find the same old cures for ailments that she would have produced. A laurel leaf preparation for viral and dental afflictions, for example; lemon balm (Melissa) for migraines and digestive troubles.

Lavender in Provence @deb_lawrenson

Les Agnels also sells perfumes, lovely fresh scents made with lavender, and Luberon flowers, fig, amber resin, and a personal favourite for hot summer days, a Green Tea eau de toilette that manages to be light and fresh and sweet at the same time. Then there are the room scents, all given names that lift the senses and transport you just to read them: Under the Lime Trees, In the Shade of the Fig Tree, and A Wander through the Garrigue, releasing breaths of sun-baked thyme, sage, rosemary and pine. The essence of Provence off the beaten track.

Want to visit these lavender distilleries?

Distillerie Les Coulets
Hameau les Coulets
Route de Rustrel
84400 Apt
Tel: +33 (0)4 90 74 07 55

Distillerie de lavande les Agnels
Route de Buoux
84400 Apt
Tel:+33 (0)4 90 04 77 00

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Deborah Lawrenson

Deborah Lawrenson spent her childhood moving around the world with diplomatic service parents, from Kuwait to China, Belgium, Luxembourg and Singapore. She read English at Cambridge University and then worked as a journalist in London. She is the author of eight novels and her writing is praised for its vivid sense of place.

The Art of Falling was a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick in 2005. The Lantern was published to critical acclaim in the USA, chosen for the Channel4 TV Book Club in the UK and shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year 2012 in the Epic category. The Sea Garden (2014) is a novel in three novellas set in Provence and London; one of these novellas features the character of Marthe Lincel the perfume maker from The Lantern and the story is based on several true events of wartime resistance in the South of France.

She divides her time between rural Kent and a crumbling hamlet in Provence, the atmospheric setting for The Lantern. Her most recent novel is 300 Days of Sun, which is set in Portugal and has been selected as a Great Group Read for the WNBA National Reading Group Month in October 2016 in the USA.

4 Comments

  1. January 5, 2017 at 11:59 am — Reply

    Buoux and the nearby Aiguebrun valley are two of Provence’s hidden gems. They are a little hard to get to but oh, so worth it.

    • January 5, 2017 at 5:12 pm — Reply

      Hi Keith: I totally agree and I love the walk/hike up to Buoux Fort.

    • January 10, 2017 at 5:07 am — Reply

      I agree! Buoux can feel a hundred miles from the main tourist spots. I like to keep an eye out for the tower of the old Priory where Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda lived for a while in the Sixties/Seventies.

      • January 10, 2017 at 10:10 am — Reply

        Hi Deborah: I will have to look for that old Priory the next time I am there, I had no idea that Vadim and Fonda had settled there in the late 1960s. Imagine what it would have been like at that time! They certainly would have had no trouble being incognito.

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