HEAVEN SCENT.
Bees. It never occurred to me that there would be bees… I’ve had a bit of a problem with nature’s pollen navvies ever since, atop a bicycle, aged eleven, I head-butted a particularly boisterous specimen coming the other way. Understandably, it retaliated. And, for the next week, I staggered myopically about with what appeared to be a tennis ball lodged under my eyelid.
Trouble is -standing in a broad, sun-baked valley daubed, as far as the eye can see, with the children’s poster paint intense hue of a thousand acres of lavender- we’re not talking about just the odd bee here: During the extraordinary, deep-veined explosion of colour that is the Crown Prince of aromatic plants’ all too brief flowering season, each and every bush plays host to about 100 bees at any one time. Given the presence of some 15,000 plants per hectare, this adds up to roughly one and a half million hyper-active bees within a stones throw of my wincing carcass. More than enough, should the mood take them, to render me lumpier than a Dr. Who extra in one brief, yelp enhanced flurry of enraged insect rumps…
Life threatening allergies aside, however, don’t let this put you off. And next time you’re biffing south through France on the interminable swelter that is the Autoroute du Soleil, let the elegance of Aix-en-Provence, the legendary bouillabaisse of Marseilles and the relentless tedium of St Tropez’s superyacht-and-topless-totty-tantalised traffic wait awhile and, pulling off the autoroute at Montelimar, bumble eastwards awhile.
This area is the Drome, named after the largest river that runs westwards through it to the Rhone. And, at the southern end of the region, sandwiched between the Rhone valley to the west, the foothills of the Alps to the east and Provence to the south, is Drome Provencal. Montelimar, gateway to the region, doesn’t, frankly, offer much to write home about except a hastily arranged dental appointment back in Blighty, but it does boast my all-time favourite road sign; Bienvenue au Montelimar –Le Home du Nougat… So much for French efforts -even unto the wielding of the big, legal stick- to halt the relentless flood of Franglais surging through their native tongue.
Which makes it all the more ironic to discover that Drome Provencal itself is so far off the beaten tourist track that English is, almost universally, not spoken here. Nor is the French quite like anything I’ve ever heard before, sounding as if every word has been briefly whizzed through a diminutive, glottis based Robochef before being unleashed on the lips.
This heady cocktail of mutual incomprehension renders my reputedly restaurant-competent French instantly redundant. “Please rub mustard into my kitten” I ask of the waiter as we pull over for lunch on the D133 a few miles south-west of Montelimar. At least I assume, judging by the look of abject horror on his face, that’s what I’ve said. It’s a long time since, having ostensibly ordered a ham and cheese roll, I’ve sat petrified at the prospect of stuffed giraffe’s neck with a side order of cicadas in aspic emerging, with a triumphant flourish, from the kitchen.
Sufficiently emboldened by the absence of anything remotely suspicious in the forthcoming baguette, we suppress the French-English dictionary panic-buying urge and potter on. The countryside is glorious. Drome Provencal’s sweeping valleys are carpeted with a retina-burning, chequered quilt of sunflowers, wheat, lavender, olives, apricots and, closer to the Rhone itself, vines. On the surrounding verdant hills, ever encroaching with increasingly vertiginous slopes as you travel east towards the Alps, broom, gorse and boxwood jostle for position with heat loving conifers and sporadic pockets of wild olive.
The strongest, most evocative clue that the region is right on the cusp of France’s Mediterranean climes comes, however, when you wind down the window; cicadas. Not, it must be said, the full diminutive-executive-jet-taxiing-round-the-house-all-evening auditory orgy of southern European olive groves, merely the individually identifiable raspings of isolated insects, like a Louisiana zydeco band-member tuning up on the washboard.
The higher the road climbs as we head to the easternmost extreme of the region for our first night’s stop, the more absolutely lavender dominates the landscape. Even high above the valley floor, isolated pockets of wild lavender offer sporadic, unexpected flashes of purple in the depths of the pine–scented undergrowth, bringing to mind the unsuccessful outcome of a mass, sponsored parachute jump by the catholic priesthood.
There are, in fact, three separate species of lavender grown in the chalky soil of the Drome Provencal, each laying claim to distinct territories dictated by altitude, so excuse me if, without troubling you with a litany of sub-species, I come over all David Bellamy for a moment:
Lavandula latifolia, called aspic or spiked lavender, has broad leaves and forms high clumps. The flower bearing stems are long, and bear two secondary flower clusters; the spikes. Grown only below 600 meters, it flowers during the month of August, and reeks of camphor. Lavandula angustifolia is true, or fine lavender. It has narrow leaves and forms smaller clumps, without secondary flower spikes. Flowering from late June to late August and grown between 500 and 1500 metres, true lavender is much prized by perfume makers for its subtle scent and, like wine and olive oil, boasts its own Appellation Controlee label. The third species, lavandin, is a hybrid; the sterile result of natural cross-breeding, through pollination by those bees, of the other two species. Lavandin, which thrives in the intermediate zone between the other two species, is a hardy plant with thick flower spikes and secondary flower clusters, with a prodigious, essential oil yield of some 5-6% compared to the frugal 1% of true lavender.
So it’s actually lavandin -dense flower heads boasting a far more intense purple colour than true lavender- that’s the star of a million local postcards; perfect line after perfect line of bright purple toothpaste squeezed meticulously from a giant tube onto a vast sheet of coarse sandpaper.
Strangely, standing waist deep in this endless sea of priestly purple, lavandin doesn’t smell anything like as intensely as I’d expected. Until that is, carefully selecting a bee-free bud, you crush the flower in your hands. At which point you’re instantly subjected to the olfactory equivalent of slamming your fingers in a car door; a smell which, don’t ask me why, always reminds me of old ladies. There’s no need, however, to go wandering out into the bees to experience this nasal membrane mugging at first hand, just pop your head round the door of one the myriad boutiques littering the region’s towns and villages. They sell all things lavender, from soaps and candles to essential oils and bags of dried, hulled flowers to bring an air of respectability to the downstairs loo. And you could cut the atmosphere with a scythe, eliciting a moment of genuine panic that there’s actually so little oxygen left in the pungent air you may not be able to breathe at all.
The little hamlet of Eygalayes, in the foothills of the Alpes de Haute Provence, offers our first experience of French bed-and-breakfast; the chambres d’hotes. Undeniably good value for money, and usually perfectly comfortable, this wholly laudable network of affordable accommodations seems to have only two drawbacks: The first, unique to Eygalayes (I sincerely hope), is a church sporting a clock that strikes the quarter hour; all… night… long. And the second is the law -harking back to the days when local farmhouses would take in, and feed, travellers- requiring the owner to eat with you. This, in the context of an unassailable language barrier combined with a hostess brighter than you mum at breakfast and louder than a Welsh male voice choir, is not always a desirable attribute after a long day lurking in the lavender.
It’s hot, muggy and overcast the next morning -thunderstorms broil and grumble amongst the precipitous crags surrounding the valley. It seems it hasn’t rained for at least three months here, and much of the local lavender is refusing to flower in protest. No problem; it always rains whenever I hunt out the promise of sun anywhere in the world, and, sure enough, the first fat drops of a serious downpour wallop, on cue, onto my blearly breakfast croissant.
In what is quietly developing into a quest for the Grail of the perfect lavender field, we drive south through the hills to Montbrun-les-Bains, a small town clinging hugger-mugger to an impossibly steep hillside topped with the statutory, impenetrable fortress. This is one of the innumerable, absurdly picturesque hilltop towns in the region, into which you instantly regret driving a car. The streets become ever narrower as you ply uphill, without so much as the hint of a turning space on offer, until confronted with the statutory dead-end. At which point the choice comes down to half-mile of A level reversing, or the surreptitious removal of a couple of chairs from a roadside patio to facilitate a twenty three-point turn. An excellent moment, when caught red-handed nosing the car all but through the kitchen door of an incandescent housewife, to deny any grasp whatsoever of the local dialect.
History suggests that these legion fortified villages and towns developed to afford protection from Moorish skirmishes into southern France, and the occasional, local, inter-nobleman dust-up. The sorry truth is, however, that said nobles rarely offered the local populace castle keep sanctuary in troubled times, merely encouraging it to settle as near at hand as possible to reduce the distances and difficulties involved in tax collection; a full grown, gently miffed pig being, after all, no lightweight, and not the easiest thing with which to share a saddle.
The morning downpour seems to have done the trick and the rolling fields surrounding nearby Ferrassiers are a riot of colour. Here, at the Chateau de la Gabelle -50% chambre d’hotes and 50% ruin, Madame Blanc still harvests her organically grown lavender smallholding by hand. Wielding a vicious, three quarter-crescent scythe with nonchalant ease, she gathers the stems of an entire plant in one hand, pushing the clump into the pull of the scythe to balance the strain on the lavender roots’ fragile foothold in the sandy soil.
Surprisingly, mechanisation only came to the harvesting of lavender in the 1960s, a response to the vastly increased demand for scented washing powders brought about by the introduction of the washing machine into daily life between the wars. But lavender has been synonymous with hygiene for so long that it actually owes its name to the Italian word lavanda, meaning ‘which is used for washing’, due to the 13th century practice of scenting bathwater with the flower hulls.
Moreover, with medicinal properties that have been recognised, and recorded, as far back as the 1st century, lavender has long been regarded as the Swiss army knife of aromatherapy. Popular medicine in Provence prescribes its soothing, antiseptic, healing and gastric properties to this day, and essential oil of lavender is still an ingredient of several pharmaceutical preparations, with an emphasis on respiratory ailments. To this day, a cup of lavender tea is said to improve digestion and ensure a good night’s sleep. Though, I confess, it’ll struggle to knock whisky off the top slot in my house.
But it was the growth of cities in the late 19th century, and the attendant increase in the popularity of perfume, that sparked an unparalleled increase in the demand for lavender. This is hardly surprising: In the days before plumbing, when bathing was something only ever undertaken by accident courtesy of a particularly slippery river bank, it’s hard to imagine how astonishingly, um, fragrant even the smallest hamlet must have been. Presumably, before this trend towards shoulder-to-shoulder urbanisation, it was simply taken for granted that each and every one of us reeked like a 6 month-old Camembert perched on a compost heap.
I can’t help feeling, however, that much of lavender’s enduring reputation as a powerful disinfectant may simply be attributed to the fact that anything capable of overcoming a smell that powerful must, automatically have been deemed medicinal. Certainly, during the outbreaks of the plague which decimated the populations of both Provence and England, the wearing of long, protective nosepieces filled with lavender flowers achieved absolutely nothing bar, I presume, a burgeoning membership of the Cyrano de Bergerac fan club.
Sadly, Grasse, the hub of the French perfume industry, is a little out of range on this particular outing, and a tale for another day. However, via the time honoured medium of shouting and advanced gesticulation, Madame Blanc lets us know there’s a soap factory down the road in nearby Sault, and nothing will do but that she hops in her car and leads the way.
This is all very well, but the good burghers of the Brunarome soap factory don’t speak English either, the only word we appear to have in common being ‘secret’. So all I am able to report is that, after much clandestine stirring, the bit we’re allowed to witness is much like Playdoh for adults, only it doesn’t smell of marzipan. The finished soap blend is pumped out of a machine at enormous pressure in one solid, continuous, rectangular bar. It’s then manually cut into the requisite sized cake and inserted in a press which stamps it into an appropriately slippery shape and engraves the makers name, and flavour, in the surface. Lavender aside, a bewildering array of pongs are available, all of them sourced from the local countryside; melon, apricot, green and black olive, even milk-and-honey –a must for aspirant Queen Cleopatras everywhere. Maintaining the food theme, I asked if they’d ever tried making anchovy soap… I’ll take that very old fashioned look as a no, then.
From Sault, which is actually just south of Drome Provencal in the Vaucluse region, the D942 runs north along a ridge overlooking the most spectacular expanse of lavender we have yet come across. The bees, backlit by the recalcitrant evening sun, are so thick in the air above the crop that I’m reminded of the cityscape in Luc Besson’s sci-fi movie, the Fifth Element, through which an impossible throng of cars fly in every conceivable direction at breakneck speed, somehow without an exchange of insurance details. The noise, too, is astonishing; the all-pervasive hum reminiscent of the world’s biggest Clio Cup motor race being staged in the next valley.
It’s no wonder the bees have to work fast, Madame Blanc tells us her entire crop will be harvested within the next eight days… In fact, the all too brief lavender flowering period corresponds to a dearth of other pollen sources for the bees. And they don’t even live up here. Overnight, on or around July 14th, thousands of hive hamlets are transported into the region and, following a month of frenetic aerial activity, the honey is harvest on around August 15th. Then, because lavender pollen isn’t actually a very nutritious source of bee sustenance, every single bee has to be transported back whence it came, to regain its strength on the apian equivalent of steak frites.
Speaking of which, though our chambre d’hotes, L’ancienne Cure, a few miles up the D72 in Buis-les-Baronnies is a gorgeous, painstakingly restored town house with a sublimely tranquil courtyard, we’re determined to dodge all threat of inter-course interrogation and eat out this evening. La Fourchette, under the arches in the centre of the town duly furnishes us with the requisite steak and frowned, but insisted, upon frites. I’m also tempted to tell you just how good the Cotes du Rhone of one M. Guigal is ( available in England), but fear popularity may put the price up…
Now, judging by the entirely dubious smell emanating from the average brewery, it’s always struck me as something of a miracle that we, as a nation, actually drink beer at all. And it strikes me, standing beside the hissing steam pots of the Distillerie Bleu Provence in the region’s capital, Nyons, the next morning, that the same applies to lavender. Far from the delicate pot-pourri pong we know so well, the smell that greets us at Philippe Soguel’s small, traditional distillery is a deep, musty, cloying, oleaginous odour which, after an hour or so, actually begins to make me feel quite queasy.
Philippe’s distillery, established in 1939, is small by modern standards. But he specialises in the distillation of essential oil from organic lavender, which produces the highest quality oil, coveted by the pharmaceutical industry and the likes of Estee Lauder.
Set into the concrete floor of the open-air distillery are two, 2 cubic meter steam chambers into which, as we arrive, Philippe (whose English is mercifully marvellous) is pitch-forking the year’s first bundles of dried lavender from the local farms. Much of the process remains manual, the only concession to modernity being the presence of a small gantry crane overhead, from which hangs what appears to be an old tractor tyre full of concrete. Sure enough, Philippe compresses the lavender bundles into the chambers with this enormous, ad hoc paperweight to ensure a slow flow of steam through each load.
Unique to this distillery, the steam chambers are built into boilers themselves surrounded by a cavernous, brick lined kiln. So only at the start of each season does Philippe have to rely on gas to fire the boilers. Thereafter, bleached of their essential oil, the redundant bales of lavender come out of the chambers and straight into the furnace; a gratifyingly waste-free process.
Filtering up through the lavender, the steam and oil extract then flows through a condensation chamber before being collected in a special tank wherein the essential oil floats to the top and may be drawn off. The whole process takes a scant 40 minutes. Reeling under the olfactory onslaught, I find it hard to believe the oil can possibly smell any better than the gently nauseating air. But dipping a finger in the still warm, shimmering surface of the tank and wiping it across my forearm, I’m instantly rewarded, once again, with the overwhelming, all too familiar aroma of old ladies.
Fully accepting that all too many of us automatically make this somewhat old-fashioned association with lavender, Philippe is undeterred by the scent’s decrease in popularity amongst the young. ‘The Egyptians first started distilling essential oils from aromatic plants thousands of years ago. Unfortunately, with our capacity to produce everything synthetically these days, we’ve rather turned our back on natural healing remedies’ he feels. ‘In future, perhaps we’ll return to a position where the two go hand in hand, rather than the one simply having replaced the other…’
Happily, the local use of lavender in at least one particular field seems to be enjoying something of a resurgence of late; cooking… Just outside the imposing, fortified town of Grignan, some 15 miles west of Nyons on the D541, lies the converted mill, La Maison du Moulin. So hilariously picturesque and tranquil is this glorious chambre d’hotes that it’s all we can do not to arrange to have the car stolen immediately, so we can stay for a week. Lavender coloured dragonflies dart across the surface of a mill pond groaning under the weight of fat, somnambulant trout whilst, over an open fire, lamb cutlets marinated in lavender, lime, olive oil and honey smoke and spit their way into the salivating affections of everyone within a twenty yard radius.
First, though, chilled melon soup; so good on a hot day, and so simple, I’ll give you the recipe now: Liquidise a properly ripe, orange fleshed melon and pop it in the freezer for at least half an hour. When you wish to serve it, stir in a good fistful of chopped radishes for their hot, peppery afterburn, add tarragon, salt, pepper and a good slug of olive oil (all to taste), and top with a frugal sprinkling of lavender leaves. Serve truly cold, even dropping in a few ice cubes if you like, and eat with olives, tapenade, baby chorizo sausages and fresh baguette, in the shade of a truly sweltering day. At this time of day a little lightly chilled Pouilly Fume never goes amiss either. Sadly, I’m driving. Home.
Lavender draped pastures and language difficulties aside, the very beauty of this region lies in its splendid isolation from the beaten tourist track. Basking in near Mediterranean-intense sunshine, Drome Provencal marches to the beat of a different, less frenetic drummer. And, fizzing back up the autoroute, grumbling uncharitably at an astonishing law which actually dictates that French radio play a dubiously high percentage of French music every hour, I’m already daydreaming of once more pottering along empty, lavender lined roads, inhaling the scent of old ladies, sitting in the shade of the terrace at La Moulin Maison, and drinking chilled melon soup until it’s coming out of my ears. Next time, however, I’m definitely packing a bee-keeper’s helmet.
CAR FACTS.
Boasting 225bhp, and good for 0-62mph in 6.5 seconds and 147mph, the pleasures inherent in throwing the Megane Renaultsport 225 at the deserted, sinuous back-roads of the Drome Provencal go without saying.
What constantly delighted us, however, was just how comfortable a performance car this is when the mood to potter overwhelms; not merely the cosseting, figure hugging seats, but also a ride which, given the 225’s handling prowess, has no right to be this supple and relaxed.
We loved the car’s long, 6th gear sponsored cruising legs too. And this isn’t just a fuel-frugality tailored, afterthought overdrive either; every time an autoroute glutted with an endless procession of Dutch caravaners cleared, the 225 pulled effortlessly away without the need to drop a gear.
Moreover, strictly legitimate or no, I started to relish driving the Megane on cruise control alone. Not only, caravans aside, can you actually use such as device on the uncluttered autoroutes of France, but it’s also pretty much essential, in a car this eager, as the means of avoiding a fiscally painful encounter with an enraged gendarme at the next peage, involving a brisk frog-march straight to the nearest cash-dispenser.
French radio (as discussed) guaranteed that the 6 CD player built into the centre console was rarely inactive, whilst air-conditioning, over the course of a journey that witnessed temperature fluctuations from 10 to 34 degrees, also proved essential.
Needless to say, despite photographer Jim reserving so much space for his equipment that my luggage allowance had more of the carrier-bag than Cartier about it, we also managed to bring home a positively disgraceful quantity of wine. Socks, I can live without.