Sunflower & Lavender

June 2004 I visited Provence, France and saw the fields of lavender and sunflowers.

Lavender has a delightful smell as well as many other fine qualities.  There is male or spike lavender, whose oil was used as a dilutant by Renaissance painters.  Some maintain it was this that imparted a particular brilliance to Ruben’s colors.  There is also a female or medicinal lavender, widely used in inhalants for the treatment of bronchitis and in skin liniments.  It’s even claimed that rubbing a bit of this lavender between one’s fingers will provide relief for a dog bitten by a snake, but this seems doubtful.  And then from June to September these violet clouds, these rotund masses become the province of working bees.

Oil is also fabricated from sunflowers, which obsessed van Gogh, who eventually managed to instill in Gauguin something of his fascination with them, while Colette wrote of them that their round centers seemed like “black honey cakes”—a rapturous, radiant flower multiplying the sun a thousandfold, following its path from dawn to dusk.

Provence, France
By Olivia Cameo Lewis, 2004