This morning the lavender is still low to the ground. The plants have come out of winter, the silver of the leaves has turned greener at the tip, and the first buds are tight and pale at the centre of the rosette. We are six to ten weeks from the cut, depending on the sky. It is 28 April here in Mévouillon.
I write to you from our Provence lavender farm in the Baronnies provençales, in the Drôme. The village sits at 840 metres, on a plateau where the Mediterranean climate meets the Alps. The almond trees finished their bloom in March. What is in flower this week is the wild thyme between the rows, and a few early-season pear trees near the house.
Why this Provence lavender farm sits at altitude
Fine lavender — Lavandula angustifolia, what the French call lavande fine — is the lavender that grows wild on the mountain slopes of Provence between roughly 500 and 1,700 metres. It is not the long, hybrid lavandin of the postcards. It is shorter, less generous in yield, slower.
I chose the altitude because the chemistry rewards it. Lavender grown high on a sunny slope concentrates its esters — primarily linalyl acetate, which carries the soft, slightly fruity character of the true lavender note. A 2018 study of alpine populations of Lavandula angustifolia linked elevation to higher concentrations of these secondary metabolites, the molecules a plant produces under stress: cooler nights, stronger ultraviolet light, a shorter growing season (Mastrogiovanni et al., PMC, 2018).
In practical numbers: lavender essential oil from sea level often runs in the low thirties for linalyl acetate. Lavender harvested above 1,000 metres can reach 40 to 44 percent, with total esters above 50 percent. The plant gives less and means more.
Lavender distillation, and the question of hours
Our lavender distillation is slow. We use a copper alembic, low pressure, a long, low fire. Copper is not a fashion choice — it binds and removes the sulphur compounds released as the plant material breaks down, which is part of why a copper-distilled oil reads as cleaner on the strip.
Each charge takes its hours. Fine lavender wants time: too short a run leaves the heavier ester and coumarin notes in the still, too long pulls vegetal bitterness into the heart. The yield, when we have done it well, sits between 0.5 and 1 percent of the fresh weight of the flower — five to ten millilitres of essential oil per kilogram of cut lavender. This is why a 30 ml bottle of lavande fine represents, by weight, several kilos of plant.
I tell you these numbers because the gap between an aromaparfumerie and an industrial perfume sits exactly there. We work with a material whose volume is small and whose information — its esters, its waters, its season — is dense.
Where this lavender will go
The fine lavender from this plateau goes into the heart of several of our compositions. It is not the headline note of any single perfume — it rarely is, in a serious formula — but it is the calming structure underneath the floral or hesperidic top, the note that makes a perfume feel breathable rather than insistent. If you have worn one of our calmer compositions on a difficult evening and felt your shoulders drop, what you were registering, in part, was the linalyl acetate.
I will not romanticise the work. I started planting on this land after twenty years inside the conventional cosmetics industry, and after a postpartum depression in which the only thing that helped me was the garden. The decision to build a maison around naturally formulated perfumes was not a marketing position; it was the only direction I could continue to work in honestly. The farm is the consequence of that decision, not its costume.
What is planned for the next quarter
The bud will tighten through May. By the second week of June, in a normal year, the rows will start to colour, and we will begin checking the essential oil profile in the lab — small distillations of cut samples — to fix the harvest window. At our altitude the cut usually falls in the first half of July, sometimes a little later. The plant is the calendar; we follow it.
In parallel, the early roses are at the foot of the buds. The first rose harvest of the year — Centifolia and Damascena — comes before the lavender, in May and June. I will write to you from the rose harvest in the next letter of this series, the second of four planned for 2026.
If you would like to see where this work happens, the farm pages on the site are quiet but accurate: /pages/the-farm and /pages/founder. For more on the materials side, the journal entry on rose varieties covers the same logic — altitude, slow distillation, restraint — applied to a different flower.
Aimée de Mars formulates without phthalates, synthetic musks, or ethanol of undocumented origin. That is a sentence I can write only because the work happens here, in the field and at the still, where each step is visible.
Until June, then.
— Valérie
