Lavender Oil (4 page)

                               
  
The choice of essential oils is important.

                               
  
It is important to know which lavender is being used.

                               
  
One lavender was twice as effective as the other lavender in reducing anxiety.

                               
  
Both lavenders greatly aided respiration – essential for postoperative cardiotomies. 20 out of 24 patients’ respirations became slower and deeper.

                               
  
More sophisticated research into how aromatherapy works is needed.

                               
  
Indiscriminate use of lavender in hospitals should be monitored or avoided.

Although ‘true’ lavender has been taxonomically classified as
Lavendula vera
de Canolle,
L. officinalis
Chaix, and
L. angustifolia
, it is the latter name which is the correct derivation for the commercially grown aromatic member of the Labiatae family.
¹
The original wild lavender (
L. officinalis
) can still be found high on the mountains of southern France where it grows on rocky soil where few other plants can survive. In the heat of July and August the wild lavender was once picked by the local peasants who carried the flowers in bundles on their backs into the valleys for distillation. Some French lavender is still produced from wild plants, but most is now grown on commercially controlled plots or ‘communelles’, where the lavender essence is graded according to exact analytical specifications and olfactory criteria. Commercial plants are grown from seeds or propagated from cuttings – though an established plant, if well pruned, may last as long as 20 years.

It is generally assumed that the majority of lavender essential oil is still produced in France, but although the French do still grow a lot of lavender, they are not, and have not been, the major producers of the essential oil for many years.
The largest producer of lavender oil today is Bulgaria, which produces around 140 tonnes plus per annum, compared to the French who produce about 43 tonnes and falling. Other countries which also produce true lavender oil in quantity are Croatia, Russia, China and Australia, and to a lesser extent, Italy and the US.

At one time, England was also famous for its lavender essence, and lavender production was an important economic aspect of English rural life. The earliest record of lavender being cultivated in England is in an ancient document belonging to Merton Priory from 1301, where there is mention of ‘Spikings – 44 quarters’, later explained as ‘spiking, spike lavender’, being grown to raise money for King Edward I. Merton Priory was in the neighbourhood of Mitcham in Surrey – an area which remains famous for its lavender fields even 600 years later! Three hundred acres of lavender were grown in and around Mitcham, in Surrey, during the mid-19th century, and the oil produced there realized six times the price of its French counterpart.

The distillation process was carried out in August when the oil content was at its height, and the fields were harvested by locals who collected the flowers into loose bundles of about one hundredweight, called ‘mats’ (nowadays most crops are harvested mechanically). At the peak of production in the Mitcham area there were at least six growers supplying the London pharmacists and markets, especially around the area of Buckersbury. Bunches of lavender were also commonly hawked in the London streets – as early as 1805 the text under a print of a lavender seller read:

                              
‘Sixteen bunches a penny, sweet lavender’ is the cry that invites in the streets the purchases of this cheap and elegant perfume. The distillers of lavender are supplied wholesale and a considerable quantity is sold in the streets to the middling classes of inhabitants who are fond of placing lavender among the linen yet unwilling to pay for the increased pungency of distillation.
²

The earliest forms of extraction were carried out by the process of water distillation. As explained in Chapter 1, the flower heads (not the stalks; using the heads only ensured a top-quality oil) were immersed in a container of water which was then heated. After about half an hour’s heating, when the distillate had began to emerge, the fire was dampened down. The aromatic oil was then carried over in a condenser with the water vapour into a copper container, where the distillate separated out into two layers with the volatile oil on top. At the end of six hours the distillation process was complete and the remains of the herb could be cleared away. The Mitcham stills were the largest in Britain and were bigger than the French field stills, with a capacity of between 700 and 1000 gallons. An 1874 survey states that 70 pounds of flowers would yield about one pound of oil – but this appears a very optimistic average!

Although the water distillation technique is still occasionally used in southern France, it was largely supplanted by the more efficient technique of dry steam-distillation at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1906, when this method was introduced, an acre of ground growing about 3,500 plants of English lavender could yield around 15 pounds of pure oil.

By the 1920s the lavender fields had all but disappeared from Mitcham, swamped by suburban development. During the 1930s the centre of lavender growing moved from Surrey to northern Norfolk and centred around the small town of Heacham. Although Norfolk still boasts a high quality essential oil, lavender growing has never again attained the importance it enjoyed in its hey day. Norfolk Lavender still cultivate 100 acres with several varieties of lavender for the production of essential oil and dried flowers, but today the bulk of lavender essential oil used in Britain is imported for use in traditional toiletries, air fresheners and perfumes as well as for detergents, waxes and other ‘industrial fragrances’. The highest quality lavender oil, with an ester content of 50 per cent or more, is reserved for exclusive perfumes; lavender oil, with an ester content of around 40 per cent is employed in lavender water and colognes; while the lower grades (approximately 30 per cent esters) are used in soap, detergents, and the like.

Where an oil is grown dramatically affects the balance of its constituents. The same variety of plant, such as
Lavendula angustifolia
, grown in the cooler English climate at lower altitudes will produce a different type of oil or ‘chemotype’ than its Mediterranean or Eastern European counterpart. Essential oil qualities also differ from batch to batch and from crop to crop, even within the same year – which of course affects the quality of the fragrance too. It was once thought that high-altitude lavender produced the best quality oil, but this is not necessarily the case since factors such as soil type and other environmental conditions also play their part.

There are over 150 different constituents in lavender oil, but the two main ones are
linalool
and
linalyl acetate
– it is these which give lavender its light,
sweetish note. The linalyl acetate (ester) content of lavender oil is also used as a criterion of quality. Typical constituents of lavender oil (
L. angustifolia
) usually fall into the following range:

The setting up of ‘communelles’ in France has enabled suppliers to offer buyers within the industry large weights of essence of a similar price and quality, but over the years this has also led to a growing trend in France towards the production of ‘speciality compositions’. This means that the suppliers ‘treat’ or ‘build up’ the primary essence to correspond to different quality levels according to the price that the buyers are willing to pay. Unfortunately, adulteration is all too common, as two of the major constituents – linalool and linalyl acetate – can be produced synthetically at a fraction of the cost. In the 1992 season, for example, official figures proved that the French produced less than 50 tonnes of lavender, yet they still managed to export well in excess of 100 tonnes!