Salt Spring Island Lavender Farm: A Morning in the Rows The lavender was still holding

A morning at a Salt Spring Island lavender farm, joining Taryn at Lavender & Black for the harvest and a distillation, with Flynn happiest of all in the rows. We spent ours with Lavender & Black, helping with the harvest and a small-batch distillation, and photographing the day for the family.

Yesterday we spent the morning at a Salt Spring Island lavender farm, joining Lavender & Black to help with the harvest and a small-batch distillation. Taryn has been going out most Thursdays over the last few months to lend a hand, and this time the whole family came along. It was a good, unhurried day, and Flynn loved every minute of it. Lavender & Black is also one of our Folklore Weddings venue partners.

Meet Lavender & Black, our Salt Spring Island lavender farm hosts

Lavender & Black is a family-run farm, distillery and studio on Salt Spring Island, working under the twin ideas of farmed naturally and artisan distilled. They grow a wide range of flowers and aromatic herbs, helichrysum, lavender, rosemary and sage among them, and supplement those crops with plants gathered sustainably from the surrounding forest and sea. Everything is harvested by hand and processed in small batches, which is the kind of slow, tactile work that feels familiar to us.

What does a Salt Spring Island lavender farm harvest actually look like?

It looks like a lot of quiet cutting, hands and secateurs, and the smell of lavender riding on the warm air long before you reach the rows. The lavender was still holding, purple and heavy, and the bees were busy in it. We worked our way down the plantings, which sit inside the treed native landscape rather than in a scrubbed monoculture, and the whole thing has the feel of a garden tended by people who care about the soil, the pollinators and the water as much as the crop itself.

There is something steadying about work that asks for your hands and your patience in equal measure.

— Folklore Creative

What happens at the still?

Once the flowers are cut, they go to the still, where the essential oil and hydrosol are drawn off in small batches. It is careful, concentrated work, and Lavender & Black formulate for potency by choosing the best ingredients and keeping them strong, so a little goes a long way. Watching a harvest turn into something you can hold in a small bottle is quietly satisfying, and it is the same instinct that draws us to hand-poured tintypes: real materials, made slowly, meant to last.

Why we photographed it

We came to help, and the camera came along the way it usually does. The pictures here are a record of one good morning at a working Salt Spring Island lavender farm, made for the people who were in them. If you'd like to see more of how we approach days like this, there is more in the journal.

What made this different from an ordinary Thursday was having all of us there together. Flynn ran the rows, found the bees, and was thoroughly at home in the dirt and the green. These are the days worth photographing, not because they are staged, but because they are true, and this is the sort of unhurried, honest work we like to bring to our photography. If you want to visit yourself, the Farm Studio is open Wednesday through Sunday, eleven to four.