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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