A record of one distillation run at Tarhill Farm this summer, from the cut to the morning after.

Every one of our perfumes has something in it that was grown at Tarhill. Scottish Lavender is the one where that is the whole point. It starts as a row of plants in our own field, and the lavender oil in it is oil we cut and distilled ourselves. We have been running a still here since 2017.

This is what one run looks like. It was 14 August 2026.

The cut

We grow seven varieties of lavender at Tarhill. The one we cut that evening was Folgate from the east bank.

When to cut is the main decision of the year, and it is made by walking the rows and looking. A lavender spike does not flower all at once. The florets open a few at a time over two or three weeks. The stage you cut at changes both how much oil you get and what that oil smells like. There is no single rule: growers commonly cut somewhere around full flower, but the best moment shifts with the variety, the weather and the oil you are after. At Tarhill we cut when the flowers are one third early, one third ready, and one third spent. 

The weather matters as much as the plant. Most of the oil is stored in tiny glands on the surface of the calyx, the ribbed cup that holds each floret. Under a hand lens they show as shining dots. We want the plants dry when they are cut. That week had been dry.

We started early at 8 am as the plants were dry. We harvested about 4 rows' worth.

Cut lavender does not keep. Left in a heap it warms up and starts to spoil, so it goes from the field to the still in less than an hour.

The still

We have four copper stills . The lavender goes in on a grid above the water, stalks and all, pressed down firmly enough that the steam cannot find an easy channel past it, but not so tight that it cannot get through. 

The two main components of lavender oil are linalool and linalyl acetate. Neither boils anywhere near the temperature of a kettle: linalool at about 198°C, linalyl acetate at about 220°C. If you had to boil them out of the plant you would cook it first.

Steam distillation gets round this with a piece of physics that is odd the first time you meet it. Two liquids that do not mix each put vapour into the space above them independently, as if the other were not there. The mixture boils when the two vapour pressures added together equal the pressure of the air. Water gets almost all the way there on its own at just under 100°C, and the oil supplies the last small part. So the oil leaves the plant in the steam, at a temperature roughly a hundred degrees or more below the boiling points of its main components.

What takes the time is getting steam evenly through the whole charge, and carrying out oil that gets harder to recover as the run goes on. The first part of a run produces oil quickly. Later the return falls away. Ours takes about 45 minutes.

The steam rises through the lavender, opens the oil glands and carries the oil over the top of the still into the condenser, a coil in a tank of cold water. What runs out of the bottom is warm, cloudy water with oil in it.

The first oil came through about 10 minutes after the steam was up. You smell it before you see it.

The separator does the last job without any help. Lavender oil is lighter than water, about nine-tenths the density, and barely dissolves in it, so it floats. The water drains from the bottom and the oil collects on top as a pale yellow layer that deepens slowly through the run. The water that drains away is not plain water. It holds the parts of the oil that dissolve most readily, linalool more than linalyl acetate, which is why it has a smell of its own and is not just weak lavender oil. 

What comes across changes during the run. The different parts of the oil do not distil at the same rate: some are strongest in the first few minutes, others peak later. So the length of a run changes what the oil is made of, not only how much of it there is. Heat and water also slowly alter some of the more fragile components, linalyl acetate among them. Eventually the extra oil coming over is too little to justify carrying on. That makes when to stop the second timing decision of the night. 

What came out

True lavender gives somewhere around one per cent of its fresh weight as oil, and often less. We only achieve one distillation a year; there is no way to make more in between, which is why our own oil goes to the perfume before anything else.

Lavender and lavandin

Much of what people know as the smell of lavender does not come from lavender. It comes from lavandin.

Lavandin (Lavandula × intermedia) is a natural hybrid of two species: true lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), which grows high in the hills of southern Europe, and spike lavender (Lavandula latifolia), which grows lower down where it is hotter. Where the two ranges meet, bees cross them. The hybrid is sterile, so every lavandin plant is a cutting from another. It is a bigger plant with longer stems, and it gives several times as much oil from the same ground. The variety 'Grosso', selected by the grower Pierre Grosso at Goult in the Vaucluse, spread quickly from the early 1970s and now makes up most of the French lavandin crop. By one estimate lavandin accounts for about 85 per cent of the lavender-type oil produced in the world each year.

The difference you can smell comes from the spike lavender parent: camphor, and a eucalyptus-like compound called 1,8-cineole. True lavender oil is low in camphor, typically around one per cent or less, and the recognised standards set the limit at about 1.2 to 1.5 per cent. Grosso is commonly around six to eight. Lavandin is sharper, more medicinal and much louder. That is not a fault. It is why lavandin is used so widely in soap and laundry products, where a scent has to survive the process and carry across a room. It is a different material for a different job.

We grow both. Of our seven varieties, six are true lavender: Folgate, Munstead, Hidcote, Imperial Gem, Little Lottie and Little Lady. The seventh is Grosso. The oil in Scottish Lavender is a blend of all seven, so it is mostly true lavender with a measure of lavandin in it. 

If you want to know which you are buying, read the Latin on the label. Lavandula angustifolia is lavender. Lavandula × intermedia or Lavandula hybrida is lavandin.

The morning after

Fresh lavender oil does not smell the way you would expect. Straight from the still it can carry what distillers call a still note: a raw, green, sometimes faintly sulphurous edge that is far more noticeable than it will be later.

Scottish Lavender is a fougère, a family of perfumes that dates from the 1880s. The classical structure sets bergamot and lavender against oakmoss and coumarin, a material whose sweet, dry smell recalls new-mown hay. Ours takes that structure literally: bergamot, our lavender, hay and oakmoss. The lavender is the part we can account for from the ground up: the varieties, the rows and the evenings they were cut.

Every bottle carries a batch number. The oil from that night went into batch BNSL7.

Scottish Lavender is £54 for 50 ml. To try it first, a 2 ml sample is £4, and the £4 comes off a full bottle.