Jeannie Ralston - The Unlikely Lavender Queen: A Memoir of Unexpected Blossoming

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

HENRI MATISSE

If you pass by the color purple in a field and dont notice it,

God gets real pissed off.

ALICE WALKER

The Color Purple

PROLOGUE

Delivery

W hen I stepped out the door at six oclock that Friday morning carrying a plastic bucket and garden clippers, the world was violet-gray, the color of a storm clouds underbelly. Shapes were black and fuzzy, as if I were wearing someone elses glasses. As I picked my way across the stone path to the driveway, I rubbed my arms against an unexpected chill, this being mid-May in Texas. The only noises besides my feet crunching on the drivewaywhich was composed of a substance ubiquitous in the Texas Hill Country called caliche, essentially limestone dustwere the doves cooing above the chirping crickets like the soft tones of an oboe laid over a chorus of violins.

It was the slice of the day that was not quite night and not yet morning. I watched my feet as I walked, to make sure I didnt stumble on the driveway, which was riddled with gullies from earlier rainstorms. I was wearing what Smith and Hawken had called muck boots, though they were not boots at all. They were more like slippers made from olive green wetsuit material. Id ordered them for just this occasion. My debut as a farmer.

As I walked the one hundred yards to the field, I recalled one of the last times I was out at this hour, years earlier. It was on the other side of sleep, right after a New Years Eve party, as I was stumbling through SoHo with my then-fiancright before I met the man who would become my husband and take me out here. I had watched my feet then, too. Mainly because I didnt trust them, in my champagne stupor, to contact the concrete securely. My shoes were different then: strappy high heels with rhinestone buckles. My life was too.

Passing the stone gate, I saw the shapes of the lavender rows spread before me. Twenty rows crawling over the hillside like so many purple caterpillars: 2,000 plants; 600,000 individual flowers. All surrounding a 450-year-old live oak that had the breadth and height of a big-top circus tent.

I stepped down one row of lavender and put my bucket down, with my dogs Katy and Weegee trailing behind me. Both were pound dogsKaty a chunky and very international mix of German and Australian shepherd. Her heavy coat was fawn colored, but she had a black raccoon mask around her eyes. Weegee was part border collie; most of his lean body was white except for his own distinctive mask. His face was half black, half whitea canine version of yin-yang.

I wasnt sure where to start my task. I breathed in as I looked to the east, at a sliver of near-neon orange that was spreading out on the horizon like a just-split egg yolk. A breeze spread ripples through the long lavender spikes and delivered a rush of lavender scent mixed with the earthy aroma of chalky soil and woody undergrowth. The smell of lavender in the field is to the lavender scent in bottled cologne what eating a fresh, ripe strawberry off the vine is to the taste of strawberry jam. Nothing manufactured can compare to lavender as God made itsweet and hearty, potent but not overbearing.

Visually, lavender rows are natures version of a pointillist work of art. Up close, every stem, every tiny bud on the pipe-cleaner-shaped flower is discernible. At middle distance, the hundreds of flowers on each plant meld into one form that suggests a pom-pom and then even farther in the distance the plants come together to create one long uninterrupted row.

Scanning the row before me, I found a plant that looked especially prolific. My husband had estimated there were three hundred flowers on each plant, shooting out from the woody part of the plant on long graceful stems, looking like hair that had been subject to a strong dose of static electricity. This plant I bent over seemed to have four hundred blooms.

I reached into the plant and grabbed what looked to be the most perfect flower. Each flower head is made up of many calyxes, which are purple and tubular shaped. Some calyxes remain closed, others burst open into petals called corollas, which appear like tiny trumpets around the flower. On the blossom I chose, about a third of the calyxes were open, all at the bottom. My fingers slid gently down the eighteen-inch stem, as if I were preparing a thread for a needle, all the way to the spot where stem met leaves. My left hand was lost in purple. My right hand, holding the clean, never-before-used pair of clippers that Id also bought for the occasion, dove in to cut at the place my left hand was holding. I pressed my right thumb toward my right fingers, which were curled around the handle, and the stem was freed. I put it in my bucket. Only 1,599 more to go that morning to fill our first order of flowers for a store in Austin.

I should have been serene. Everything about the setting screamed serenity, soulfulness, romance. But at the moment my emotions were at direct odds with the scene. I was thinking not that Martha Stewart might have approved of our crop, or that kneeling in a lavender field in full bloom might be somebodys idea of heaven. I was thinking about my husband and how he had done it to me again. Dragged me into something that I was supposed to embrace fully, dragged me into his dream. I snipped another lavender stem, harder than necessary.

Here I was alone out in a lavender field, doing something as unfamiliar to me as riding a bucking bronco. I had no farming experience. Before I gave up trying I sent more houseplants to their death than the state of Texas has criminals. Now he had left me to handle this whole farm alone. Alone, again, I thought bitterly as I cut more stems until the number of flowers in my bucket looked to be enough for one bouquet. I clutched the stalks in my hand; the thickness seemed to equal a serving of uncooked spaghetti. Forty stems, I guessed. In spite of myself, I admired the bouquets loveliness, how lavender was not about each part, but the sum of them. How in numbers there was real beauty, a beauty exponentially greater than each singleton.

When my husband, Robb, hatched the idea for a lavender farm, I had resisted, just as I had resisted moving here. But ultimately I had a reason to move to the country, far from normal life as I knew it; it was part of a compromise. Tending a lavender farm, though, chopping away in a field like a migrant worker, was never part of the deal.

I had to give Robb credit. He was persuasive. Surely the most persuasive man in the world. My being in the field at this hour, when I could have been doing something truly productive like writing, was certainly proof of it. There was a time I would do anything for an article; while reporting a cover story for Life, I got myself arrested at an abortion protest just to find out what the evangelical activists went through in jail. Since moving to the country, I would often wonder where I might have landed if my trajectory hadnt been interrupted, if I hadnt landed here in the Texas Hill Country. But usually I had to turn my mind away from such thoughts. I had to put down the magazines emblazoned with names of onetime colleagues if I didnt want my throat and pride to burst.