Blue Fields, Blue Threads: The Lavender Weavers of Valensole

The lavender fields of Valensole flower in the first week of July, and the whole plateau — sixty kilometres east of Aix-en-Provence — vibrates with a low, almost mechanical hum: two million bees, working in shifts.

In the village itself, in a stone-walled atelier that was once a bakery, the cooperative Tissages du Plateau has been weaving lavender-dyed linen since 1978. Eight weavers, four looms, one dye vat. The dye is not chemical; it is the exhausted lavender pulp left over from the distilleries, boiled with iron mordant into a soft, muted violet that no synthetic can match.

The cooperative's founder, Sylvie Marchand, 74, learnt weaving from her grandmother and dyeing from a Catalan textile chemist who retired to the village in the 1970s. She has trained, by her own count, forty-one apprentices. Six of them still weave professionally, which she considers a triumphant ratio.

July is harvest and market season at once. Bags of coarse-woven linen — the sacs de récolte — are stacked by the door, ready to hold the cuttings. Finer pieces — table linen, curtains, the famous striped Valensole tea towel — are folded for the Saturday market in Riez.

"The tourists take the small things," Sylvie says. "The chefs from Marseille take the tablecloths. And the farmers take the sacks. Every part of the loom's output has a customer. That is the definition of a healthy craft."