The Inspiration for our Lavender Pattern

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Lavender is at home in every room of the house with our beautiful line of pottery.

The woolly grey green of the lavender plant with its rounded leaves was a natural for the decorating brush. Each leaf emerges from one stroke and the flower stem arcs only slightly weighed by the tidy lavender flower on its tip created by a series of tiny dabs. I understand that there are many varieties of lavender. It seems that there are French lavenders and English lavenders. But the fragrance of lavender in either variety will always remind me of my grandmother’s house and being only tall enough to barely reach the lavender water and little soaps on the sink. Lavender seems to often be associated with washing, coming from the Latin word lavare, to wash. The fragrance seems so cleansing. What better compliment could we find for our lavender bathroom accessories, giving a feeling of simple cleanliness that is connected to the symbols of the ages?

Having grown several varieties of lavender with plenty for picking, I remember plaiting the stems into intricately woven baskets and filling them with rose petals. The stems are just pliable enough to flex and bend and yet stiff enough to hold their shape. It seems that we used the flower with stem to make something called tussie mussies for the linen drawer. It was intricately woven and resulted in all the flower heads clustered together inside a finely woven basket. Our ceramic tea sets seem perfect for those twining stems of lavender, as they encircle our teapot and tea cups.

Some say it smells medicinal, but I prefer to think of the smell as healing and soothing and somewhat pine scented. They say that lavender should be in the room of one who is suffering migraine headache. Certainly some of the varieties have rather spiky pine needle-like leaves, though the Biblical name of Spikenard probably refers to the flower spike. Just think, this flower has been near household gardens for all those years.

Lavender holds its blooms for a long time and the bees enjoy the plants perseverance. My daughter, when she was four, had the pleasure of blowing the bees off the lavender blooms and watching them hurry back to the flower, not to be dissuaded. She said that they were busy bees but it kept her busy for hours. I guess they were so intent on their work and so enraptured by the lavender nectar, that they forgot to look around and see what was creating the recurring breeze in their direction.

Lavender comes in a wide range of shades of lavender. Once, when traveling home from Egypt via Paris, we looked out the airplane window over France upon fields and fields of lavender. The countryside was a patchwork of every imaginable color of lavender, some deep nearing purply and others blueish, while others pale almost whitish lavender. I’m sure I could smell the remembered fragrance while I gazed down from thousands of feet up. Around the edges of each square or rectangle of lavender, a trim of grey green and mossy green marked the transition from one field to the other. It was an outstanding sight, one always to be remembered. I had no idea that so much lavender was grown.

If you love lavender, we’ve set our hands to making lavender clocks, lavender bakeware, lavender vases, lavender lamps…everything you could need to celebrate the beauty of lavender.