3695 - The Power of a Cliché


It’s Provence. Everywhere you go, you see lavender, right?

Well, that’s a cliché. It’s not true. Actually you have to look for it, and when you by chance happen to avoid certain places like the region around Valensole, you may even manage to never see a lavender field at all. In any case it won’t strike you as a determining trait of the landscape.

That was different a few decades ago. Lavender is cumbersome as an agricultural product. It is endangered by certain insects (the very cicadas that we saw in wooden replicas a few posts ago), and in fact what we see today is not true lavender (lavande) at all, it is a similar but more resistant plant called lavandin.

The other cause of the slow demise of lavender is fashion. Lavender has become an old-fashioned protection against moths, and it is also frequently used in cheap room perfumes and toilet cleaners. That’s the kind of application, that kills your reputation 🙂

As a consequence, the area devoted to lavender is continuously in decline. There’s a lot left, but you have to search for it these days.