Walk the lavender rows at sundown before the harvest

The plateau of Valensole runs to more than 800 square kilometers of Haute-Provence, and in the nineteenth century it was almost all almond trees. Most of the purple on it now is lavandin, a cross between true lavender and spike lavender that arrived in the 1920s and gives far more oil. In the bloom the smell reaches the road before the color does.

The group sleeps in Moustiers-Sainte-Marie, about half an hour away, so the fields get two visits on the same day: once at a family farm in the heat of the day, when the cutting happens, and again in the evening, when nobody is working them.

Around nine the sun goes down sideways across the rows. Everybody takes the same photograph. Everybody is right to.

The rows are only there for a few weeks. Around Valensole the flowers start in mid June and peak in early July, and the harvest often starts around 14 July, earlier in a dry summer, with the dates moving ten to fifteen days from one year to the next. In 2026 the plateau was in full bloom with the harvest already under way on 2 July. Once a field is cut it is tidy gray-green stubble until the next summer.