English Lavender field Postcard

Mayfield Lavender was born when Brendan Maye was Managing Director of the fine fragrance division of Wella UK. He believed that consumers needed to witness the beauty of lavender to accept it as a relevant fragrance for today and came up with a proposal to buy a farm and revive lavender growing under the Yardley brand in Surrey, its traditional home in England. This was rejected by his parent company but two years later a persistent Brendan got the go-ahead, although was stopped from actually buying a farm. He commissioned environmental charity Bioregional Development Group to help get the lavender planted. In 2002 Bioregional leased the land from Sutton Council and Yardley sponsored the planting of the lavender. In the first year half the field was planted with the English Lavender variety Folgate. But disaster struck when Magpies and Crows pulled all of the newly planted plugs out of the ground, destroying almost 70,000 plugs. The following year half of the field was again replanted with Folgate. This was successful and in 2004 the second half of the field was planted with two further varieties – an English Lavender called Maillette and one Lavandin called Grosso. However, in 2005 the plan fell apart when the Yardley brand was sold and the acquiring company had no interest in the sponsorship programme, choosing instead to focus on export business for Yardley. BioReginal told Brendan the project was unsustainable without sponsorship. So Brendan agreed to personally acquire the project himself to ensure it would not simply die away. Having made the commitment he then had the dilemma of what is involved in farming 25 acres of organic lavender, and who would manage it while he continued his day job. Luckily his wife came to the rescue and it was Lorna’s heroic commitment during the summer of 2006 and 2007 that sustained the project. She quickly learned how to manage and harvest lavender as well as all the logistics of co-ordinating the distillation and the product sales from the field. Brendan and Lorna now work together to nurture and build Mayfield Lavender and are committed to the organic management of the field. They are very proud of the fact that the field sits on the exact spot where lavender was grown in the 18th and 19th century.