The Long, Strange Journey of Lavender (From Mediterranean Hillsides to My Utah Garden)

When you visit my market booth and smell one of my soaps with lavender essential oil in it, have you ever thought, “I wonder how long humans have been using lavender?” Well, maybe you haven’t thought about that, but I sure have. Right now it’s lavender season in the garden and I’ve been harvesting it every morning. As I harvested those tiny purple flower buds I thought how many humans have used lavender and how enmeshed in human hygiene and health has lavender become? So I decided to look it up and found it’s way more interesting than the typical stories on the internet would have you believe. Come with me as I dive into the deep connection between humans and lavender and how this Mediterranean plant found itself halfway across the world in my northern Utah garden.

First off, I need to dispel one common myth about the origins of lavender. As romantic as the story is, there is no factual evidence that the aroma of lavender was actually coming from the open sarcophagus of Tutankhamen. There were no plant remains found on the mummy or in containers. Egyptians did use lavender infused oil, but the volatile oils from lavender will degrade over time, and without any plant matter nearby, any essential oils would have evaporated within a couple of years.

We all know Provence as the lavender capital of the world, but where did lavender originally come from? Let’s take an imaginary trip across the ocean and back in time to the Mediterranean basin. Lavandula angustifolia , most commonly known as lavender stemming from the Latin word “lavare” (to wash), is found all over the Mediterranean. Long before lavender found its way into garden centers and soap shops, it grew wild in the rocky, sun-baked hillsides of the Western Mediterranean. The genus Lavandula calls the limestone mountains of Spain, France, and Italy home, the Pyrenees and the Alps in particular, where the soil is thin, the summers are hot, and the air carries that distinctive maritime breeze. This is the birthplace of what we now call English or true lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), the variety most prized for its sweet, clean fragrance and the one most likely growing in your own garden.

Lavender has quite a large family, too. Of the roughly fifty species and hybrids that make up the genus, about thirty grow wild somewhere around the Mediterranean basin, stretching along the coastlines of the Adriatic, the Balkans, and even into North Africa and the Middle East. There’s even an unexpected outpost: the volcanic, subtropical Canary Islands are home to their own native lavender, Lavandula dentata, proof that this plant has always had a knack for adapting to wherever it lands.

It’s a fitting origin story for a plant that has spent thousands of years migrating from rocky Mediterranean slopes into nearly every corner of the world, including, eventually, my own high desert garden here in Utah, a landscape that shares more in common with those sun-baked hillsides than you might expect.

Long before lavender found its way into Roman bathhouses, it had already passed through Greek hands. The Greeks owed much of their early perfume knowledge to Egypt, borrowing techniques for scented oils and unguents before refining the craft into something distinctly their own. By the third century BC, the philosopher and naturalist Theophrastus was writing about lavender’s scent as part of a broader treatise on fragrance, one of the earliest surviving accounts of how the ancient world thought and wrote about scent. A few centuries later, the physician Dioscorides gave lavender its first real botanical record, cataloging it in his sprawling herbal De Materia Medica under the name stoichas, named for the Stoichades islands off the coast of Massalia, the Greek colony we now know as Marseille. Tuck that little detail away; we’ll be coming back to it once we land in Provence.

The Greeks weren’t shy about debating exactly how to wear their scented oils, either. The philosopher Diogenes preferred applying his to his feet rather than his head, reasoning that scent applied up high simply drifted off into the air, while scent applied low would rise up and envelope him for hours, reaching his nose all on its own. The poet Anacreon, on the other hand, recommended applying it straight to the chest, believed at the time to be the seat of the heart. Whatever the method, lavender had clearly already secured its place in the ancient world’s beauty and wellness routines well before a single Roman ever stepped into a bathhouse.

A very cool side note I found in my research: on the island of Cyprus  in the town of Pygros, archeologists found an ancient perfumery dating back to 2000 BCE where they produced essential oils on an industrial scale! They created terracotta alembics to distill the essential oils out of plants. To learn more about the making of essential oils hop over to my Essential Oils 101 post. 

From Greece, lavender’s reputation traveled naturally to Rome, where it found its biggest cultural spotlight yet. The Romans were famously devoted to bathing, and a trip to the bathhouse was less a quick wash than a full sensory ritual. After working up a sweat in the palaestra, bathers didn’t reach for soap, they didn’t really have it yet, at least not as we know it. Instead, they coated their skin in fragrant oil, often scented with lavender, and scraped it away along with the day’s grime using a curved tool called a strigil.

That oil wasn’t just functional. Lavender was a favorite for these bathhouse rituals because of its calming, almost aromatherapeutic quality, prized for easing anxiety and promoting relaxation long before anyone had coined the word “aromatherapy.” And the Romans didn’t stop at lavender alone. According to my perfumery book, Roman perfumers often paired lavender with fennel in their fragrant oils, a combination that must have been both herbaceous and faintly sweet, grounding and bright all at once.

It’s a combination I couldn’t resist revisiting in my own studio. My soap Dolceacqua, blended with lavender, fennel, and a hint of patchouli, is a small homage to those ancient Roman oils. The Romans may have used a strigil instead of a bar of soap, but the instinct behind it, reaching for lavender to cleanse, soothe, and care for the body, hasn’t changed in two thousand years.

Why Oil Cleanses: A Quick Science Aside

Oil-based cleansing works on a simple principle: like dissolves like. The dirt, sweat, and sebum sitting on skin is itself oily, so when the Romans coated their skin in olive oil, that oil bound with the grime and lifted it away, leaving the strigil to scrape off the mixture. It’s a different mechanism than modern soap, which uses surfactants to rinse oil and dirt away with water, but the underlying logic still holds true today, which is part of why oil cleansing remains so effective.

Rome’s fall didn’t dim lavender’s reputation, it only deepened it. As the bathhouses and perfumeries of antiquity faded into history, lavender found a new home behind the walls of medieval monasteries, growing alongside rows of other healing herbs in small, carefully tended plots. Monks cultivated it as much for its protective qualities as its healing ones, part of a much larger tradition of monastic herbalism that I’m saving for its own post later this summer, because honestly, it deserves more than a few sentences here.

For now, it’s enough to say that lavender’s reputation had traveled a long way by the time the Black Death swept through Europe. People carried lavender sprigs and tucked them into their clothing, convinced its scent alone could ward off the plague. Whether or not it actually worked, lavender’s status as a plant of protection and purification only grew stronger with each passing century, setting the stage for its next transformation: from monastery garden staple into the polished, perfume-bottle name we know today.

That transformation didn’t happen overnight, and fittingly, it started right back where lavender first crossed from Greece into French soil. Greek traders are credited with bringing lavender to the Hyères Islands off Toulon around 600 BC, the very same stretch of coast tied to the Stoichades name Dioscorides recorded centuries later. Once it took root, Roman cultivators expanded lavender’s presence across the region and discovered that its flowers could be distilled into oil.

Lavender’s leap into the perfume world we’d recognize today, though, didn’t happen until the Renaissance, and the unlikely place it happened was a glove-making town. Grasse was originally known for tanning leather to make gloves for noble families across Europe, and since the smell of tanned hides wasn’t exactly pleasant, glove makers started scenting them with orange blossom, lavender, and imported spices, a trend that became fashionable at the French court under Catherine de’ Medici in the sixteenth century. From there, Grasse never looked back. By 1759, the town had formed a formal corporation of master perfumers, cementing lavender’s shift from medicinal garden plant to genuine commercial commodity. The nineteenth century brought industrial-scale distillation and large-scale cultivation, turning lavender into a true cash crop across Provence, one locals came to call their “blue gold.”

Today Grasse is still widely known as the world’s perfume capital, and in 2018, UNESCO recognized the region’s perfume-making traditions as part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage. The fields most of us picture when we think of Provence, the Valensole Plateau, the Luberon Valley, mile after mile of purple rows under a hot summer sky, only date back a century or so as agricultural land. But the plant growing in them is the very same one Theophrastus wrote about, the same one Roman bathers scraped off their skin with a strigil, the same one that found its name tucked into a Greek physician’s herbal nearly two thousand years ago.

And that, in a roundabout way, is how lavender ended up in my garden here in Northern Utah. This high desert shares the same hot, dry summers and thin, well-drained soil as those Mediterranean hillsides lavender has always called home, which is exactly why it thrives here the way it does in Provence. Every June, when I’m out harvesting those tiny purple buds for my soap, I like to think about just how far this plant has traveled to get here, from wild Mediterranean slopes, through Greek perfumers and Roman bathhouses and monastery walls, into the glove-scented air of Renaissance Grasse, and finally into a garden bed a few thousand miles and a few thousand years removed from where it all started. Next time you pick up a bar of my lavender soap, you’re holding a little piece of all of that history.

Sources

Cache Creek Lavender, “History of Lavender” — https://www.cachecreeklavender.com/history-of-lavender.html

Journals Publisso, “From antiquity to modern hygiene: the archaeological and medicinal legacy of lavender as a promising antimicrobial agent” — https://journals.publisso.de/en/journals/hic/volume20/dgkh000550

Going.com, “Provence: The Lavender-Scented French Region That Inspired Poets and Painters” — https://www.going.com/guides/provence-the-lavender-scented-french-region-that-inspired-poets-and-painters

French Waterways, “See the lavender fields of Provence” — https://www.french-waterways.com/lavender-fields-provence/

Provence Holidays, “The history of perfume in Provence” — https://www.provenceholidays.com/en/magazine/the-history-of-perfume-in-provence

TripUSAFrance, “The History & Significance of Lavender in Provence” — https://tripusafrance.com/provence-lavender/

Blooming Expert, “The Real History of Lavender: A Trip Through France, Spain, and Italy” — https://www.bloomingexpert.com/tips/lavender/the-real-history/