Will I Have to Re-think Elgiva? What This Summer's Drought Is Doing to Lavender

Not yet, and I hope never. But this summer has been the first time I've had to properly sit with the question, and I think it's more honest to talk about it openly than to pretend everything in the lavender world is calm.

I've written before about the trip I made to Provence in June, walking through a field that should have been a wall of purple and finding it patchy, full of weeds, and thinner than it had any right to be. That wasn't one bad field or one unlucky farmer. It's part of a pattern The Times reported on this summer: warmer winters are killing off fewer of the pest eggs that would normally die back in the cold, drier springs are limiting how much the flower heads can grow, and hotter summers are dragging the harvest forward by weeks. Caterpillars and cicadella leafhoppers, which love the new, milder winters, are doing real damage. In some areas, production is already down by more than 13 per cent.

Reporting from further afield backs this up. Provence's lavender industry, worth in the region of $55 million, is facing the same leafhopper problem from another angle: the insects don't just eat the plants, they spread a disease called stolbur phytoplasma that can cut a lavender plant's productive life from around ten years down to three or four. That's not a bad season, that's a much shorter working life for the fields that supply oil to the whole industry, Elgiva included. Growers, scientists and local businesses have set up a fund, the Fonds de Dotation Sauvegarde du Patrimoine Lavandes en Provence, to trial disease-resistant hybrids and to plant cover crops between the lavender rows to help the soil hold on to moisture and slow the pests down. It's sensible, careful work, and it also means the postcard-perfect stripes of purple we all associate with Provence may start to look a bit different, threaded through with the green and yellow of legumes and grains. One grower called this resistance to change “postcard syndrome,” and I understand it completely. Nobody wants to be the generation that changes the view.

It isn't only lavender, and it isn't only France's south. Wildfires this summer tore through more than 11,000 hectares by early July, roughly half the damage seen in the whole of the previous year, with the Minervois and Roussillon wine regions among the hardest hit. Winemakers there are now worrying about smoke taint on top of the vines they've already lost, which tells you this is a Mediterranean agriculture story, not a single-crop one. Closer to home, the Horticultural Trades Association reported that UK garden centres had a rough June too, their second hottest on record, with hardy plant sales down and real confusion over hosepipe bans putting people off visiting altogether. Even the plants we think of as tough are having a harder time of it, and gardeners everywhere are being told the same thing: water deeply but less often, mulch to hold moisture in, and where you can, choose plants suited to drier conditions in the first place. Lavender has always been that plant, the drought-tolerant one, the one you'd recommend to a friend with a parched, sunny border. It's a strange feeling to watch the most resilient plant I know start to struggle.

So, will I have to re-think Elgiva? Not this year. Our oil is single-estate, which means I know exactly whose lavender it is and roughly what condition their fields are in, rather than buying blind from a blended, anonymous supply chain that could be sourced from anywhere. That closeness is precisely what lets me tell you all this honestly instead of quietly hoping you don't ask. But I'd be lying if I said the next five or ten years look as settled as the last fifty. If the growers we rely on are nursing shorter-lived plants, thinner harvests and unpredictable weather, then oil like ours, undiluted and properly sourced, is only going to become a more precious thing, not a less precious one.

I don't have a tidy conclusion, because there isn't one yet. What I can tell you is that I'll keep going back to Provence, keep asking the growers hard questions, and keep telling you the truth about what I find, good or bad. For now, our single-estate French lavender essential oil is still exactly what it's always been. If you'd like to try it while the fields are still standing, you can find it here.