Reading the Season: Harvest Notes from the Drôme
When to cut a lavender field is never marked on a calendar. It's read in the colour of the bract, the hum of the bees, the dryness of the afternoon air.
Ask a grower when the harvest begins and you will rarely get a date. You will get a description: when the lower third of the spike has faded, when the field stops smelling green and starts smelling sweet, when the bees grow quiet because the nectar has already gone.
The Drôme teaches patience. Cut too early and the oil is thin and grassy; the plant has not yet finished translating sunlight into fragrance. Cut too late and the top notes have already lifted into the air on the hottest afternoons, leaving something flatter behind.
A window of days
The right moment is a window of perhaps four or five days, and it arrives differently on every slope. A south-facing field ripens before the one across the valley. We walk them daily in the final week, rubbing a few spikes between finger and thumb, and trust the nose over the notebook.
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