Mill Creek Lavender is part of a 32 acre property nestled in the picturesque Mill Creek Valley, fifteen minutes from Whitianga, on the eastern side of the Coromandel Peninsula. The best time to see our lavender gardens in bloom is late December and all through January, spanning Christmas, New Year and the summer school holidays. At this time when the peninsula is abuzz with holiday makers, the beaches full of bikini clad beauties and blokes in boats, our little pocket of paradise is abuzz with nothing more than the hum of bumble bees going about their business. The two things that visitors always remark on are the fragrance of the lavender, and the peaceful setting.

The lavender flowers are harvested during February and distilled onsite, with the essential oil or flowers being used to create a wide range of high quality lavender products which are available online through selected local retailers. The best time to see the lavender in bloom is during December and January. Visitors to Mill Creek Lavender are invited to stroll through our gardens, pick a bouquet of lavender flowers in season, enjoy a cappuccino or a latte on the lawn, picnic by the river or take a dip in the swimming hole.

The Mill Creek Valley offers a glimpse of a rural way of life on the Coromandel Peninsula, a simple way of life that is fast disappearing in many parts of this world. Up here, we know all our neighbours, and we all look out for each other. The local sport is pig hunting, the vehicle of choice a dusty four wheel drive. Our farmhouse accommodation is set in the oldest building in the valley, a kauri homestead built in the 1920s by a long-gone, but not forgotten local identity, Fanny Crosby. The valley is dominated by the benevolent presence of Fog Hill, which was the inspiration for our logo – two sprigs of lavender with Fog Hill in the background.

I am often asked why I decided to grow lavender. The answer isn’t simple. I came back from Japan to live on this property in 2000. I wasn’t sure what I would grow on the land, but I knew that I had found a beautiful, beautiful place to live. I wanted to share this treasure with others who would also appreciate it; to create a sanctuary where people could come and just be; to begin a project which I hope I will be able to work on for the rest of my life. My dream is to create a park-like environment on these 32 acres, a jewel in the picturesque Mill Creek Valley, that will endure long after I have shuffled off this mortal coil.

Sounds fabulous, doesn’t it? But how would I, a newly single mother of extremely limited financial means, pay for all this? Well, everybody loves lavender and essential oils, don’t they? People might go out of their way to visit a lavender farm and experience the wonder of a field of lavender in flower – they might even drive 4 km up a dusty Coromandel road if they could have a cappuccino when they got here. And gosh, if there were a shop selling exquisite lavender products ... and so the idea of Mill Creek Lavender was born. A way of making my property pay its way, while enabling me to share it with visitors from all over New Zealand, and all over the world.

The garden hadn’t been gardened for a couple of years, so as soon as I got here, I rolled up my sleeves and started clearing weeds – everything from the catalogue of noxious and banned plants, as well as vicious thorny roses that trailed for up to 12 metres and entangled everything in their path. Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted forest had nothing on my garden. It took a few weeks, but I got most of the gardens cleared. No more weeds, just fresh, bare, clean earth, waiting to be planted.

And then the rain started.

I’d spent almost every summer of my youth on the Coromandel Peninsula – long, hot, balmy days on the beach, swimming, fishing, sunburn, campfires at night, starlit walks – I don’t remember anything about rain. But that was summer. In winter it rains here. All . . . the . . . time. Remember that fresh, bare, earth? Remember the adage, ‘one year’s seeding, seven years’ weeding’? Well, bare earth, several years’ of weeds seeding, a mild climate, and all that rain, plus it being too wet to work in the garden, meant a whole lot more weeds! The area I had prepared for lavender could have been used to illustrate a textbook about common weeds in New Zealand, and I still hadn’t planted any lavender!

That was four years ago. (As I write, it is Autumn, 2004) The weeds still come up, but are not quite so rampant, the garden looks fabulous (if you sort of squint), the lavender is doing its thing, and giving up its essential oil every summer. When I opened the shop this past December, and was able to look out and see people in my landscape, drinking coffee at outdoor tables, strolling through the lavender and stopping to smell a flower or remark on the bumble bees, I felt like an artist who had just painted the final stroke on her first painting. Of course, I’m only just getting started, and there’s a lot more to do, but it’s been a great beginning.

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