11 Rings to the Lavender Labyrinth
You haven’t lived until you get lost in the violet aroma lair
My partner Starr and I once got lost in a labyrinth of our own creation.
I’m not speaking metaphorically; in 2019 she and I decided to plant a giant labyrinth garden in the field that lies to the south of our home.
In the years to follow, we dug over a quarter of a mile of curving, raised beds and set out over 3000 lavender plants. We had a goal, but at a certain point in our construction project we got lost.
Andrew Griffin from Mariquita Farms wrote this essay— what a treat.
Andy was growing organic greens when Alice Waters was first opening shop and needed his lettuce. He was laying out a philosophy of food and politics and language for all of it, when Michael Pollan was just crawling out of his egg.
His newsletter, the “Ladybug Letter,” has been my grad school in growing education. Thank you, Andy!
A labyrinth is different from a maze. A maze will lure you down a false path and puzzle, teach, terrorize or entertain you.
A labyrinth, by contrast, offers you a single path to follow— and if you keep going, if you don’t quit, you don’t turn back, and even if you don’t cheat and “jump across the lines,” you WILL find the center.
Labyrinths can be meditation tools. They are certainly a metaphor for life; sometimes the “path we’re on” in life appears to be leading us astray, even though (in hindsight) we see we were being drawn closer to our “center” all along.
Other times, our life’s goals seem to be within reach when our pathway veers away from our destination, or even seems to cause us to reverse ourselves.
When Starr and I found that we’d dug ourselves into a dead-end in our own labyrinth, we had a laugh about our predicament. We went back to the drawing board and shovels, and after three more days of work, our “a-mazing” lavender planting became properly labyrinthine.
We are now five years away from having conceived of this garden. The lavender plants are mature and reaching their prime. We invite all to come and visit the Ladybug’s Labyrinth on Saturday, May 4th, for World Labyrinth Day.
Labyrinths have been created by different societies and cultures around the world— some designs are thousands of years old. Starr and I modeled the labyrinth that we built on the medieval-era labyrinth located within the Chartres Cathedral.
But where that Catholic labyrinth is laid as a mosaic into the floor of an overarching stone building, we wanted our labyrinth to grow up out of the earth, with nothing overhead but the birds, the butterflies, and the blue vault of the heavens— an inviting garden framed by redwood trees, camellias, roses and cacti, not stone walls. We’re farmers, after all, not Popes, and the earth is our church.
Step One: Site Selection
Sometimes in life we don’t get to select. Sometimes we play the cards we’re dealt. At Mariquita Farm we’re lucky enough to have several potential sites for a labyrinth so we chose the field that lies to the south of our home.
The southern exposure means that the field is warmer, and potentially drier than our fields to the west or to the north. Our southern field is set in a bowl with the gentle northern slope acting to shelter the site from any winds over the mountains to the north. The southern edge of the field is screened by a riparian forest, sheltering the spot from wind off the Pacific ocean three miles to the south.
A different patch of ground, with different exposure and a different micro-climate, might have called for a different crop, but we figured that lavender might enjoy this sunny and sheltered setting.
Lavender needs good drainage to thrive and I knew that our southern field could offer that! Life may be a spiritual journey through a labyrinth, but a career in farming is a maze to negotiate with many false starts and dead ends.
Back in 2000, I had this field laser-leveled by my neighbor, Bobby Peixioto, who runs the Pajaro Valley Laser Leveling Company. Bobby took all the top soil off an acre of ground and piled it to one side. Then he graded the underlying clay formation until it was flat and smooth, giving the ground a slight downhill pitch to the east, so that excess water would drain off. He spread the topsoil back evenly across the whole field.
I erected an acre of metal-framed hoop houses across the land with an eye to growing wintertime herbs and veggies. A freak snowstorm arrived before I had a chance to plant a single crop, and it flattened my brand new greenhouses. I was crushed. I cleaned the field up of all the debris and returned the land to pasture.
Until now. The soil is rich, well drained, and well rested. The field even has a pipe to it that can deliver thousands of gallons of water from my storage tanks.
If commercial farming had been a costly failure on the site then maybe that was just fate telling me to take a more artistic, meditative approach to working the land in the future.
Step Two: Study and Research
Normally, step two would be to build a very high deer fence around the field. But I had done that years before. Here in Corralitos, if you don’t want to build a deer fence around your land you shouldn’t even bother to farm. Lavender is not known to be attractive to deer, but that’s not all we want to grow in the labyrinth garden.
Our dream for the lavender labyrinth is for it to be set in the landscape like a purple jewel, embraced by flower beds, herbs, milpas of corn, rows of roses, and by citrus orchards.
We sometimes have mountain lions in the canyon below the labyrinth, and a healthy mountain lion will eat one deer a week, but “unfortunately,” we see many more deer than lions looking in through the wire mesh fences. Starr and I used the time we didn’t spend building a tall deer fence to go and visit other labyrinths, learning what we could.
The Sibley Volcanic Preserve’s labyrinth in Oakland is as strange and beautiful as it was unexpected. The Lands End labyrinth in San Francisco, majestic. The labyrinth at The University Of Saint Thomas in Houston was as calm as that city is frantic. Starr took a course from Lauren Artress of Veriditas on labyrinths.
Step Three: Field Fertility and Crop Selection
A livestock pasture left fallow for nineteen years gave the ground a good rest, but I wanted to get rid of turf and create a more malleable and weed-free seedbed for the lavender crop I’d be planting.
Along with prepping the outdoor ground, I planted trays of lavender seed indoors: the short, purple bloomed variety of lavender called “Ellagance.” I also sourced a thousand each of seedlings of Hidcote lavender and Provence lavender. The shortest and earliest blooming lavenders would ring the center of the labyrinth, and reserve the taller, later blooming varieties for the outer beds.
I thought about what the labyrinth would look like to a Google Earth satellite passing overhead, and I imagined an open eye with a purple iris looking up at the sun.
Step Four: Design Placement
Setting the labyrinth in the field was a task that called for me to march around the field with a flag on a tall stake while Starr stayed up on the hill and directed me to the left, to the right, back this way, and then over there, until she found a spot that felt like the emotional center of the field.
We had envisioned an eleven circuit labyrinth. We got some string, tied it to the central metal fence post and circumscribed the outline of the outer edge of the potential labyrinth, marking it with tiny flags. It turned out to be 110 feet wide!
Using the rototiller pulled behind by my little Kubota tractor, I tilled up all the ground that encircled the labyrinth site. We were left with a bright, green grassy disk of the field marking out the footprint of our future labyrinth.
Step Five: COVID
Step Five did not follow Step Four the way that thunder follows lightning.
Covid erupted. The disruption to everyday affairs provoked by the plague would eventually “give” us the time away from our normal lives we’d needed to get the labyrinth’s paths dug and planted. But the actual construction of the labyrinth was a disjointed affair that we completed over two springs, when the rain softened the soil enough to work.
We measured out the width of the resting space that we wanted to have at the center of the labyrinth. We conceived of an area wide enough for a dozen people to sit comfortably and look around themselves at the flowers and trees and bees, the birds and the clouds.
I dug the first ring-like trench around the center and heaped up the soil to one side to form a round, raised bed two-feet wide. That first, central bed would be the shortest bed of the entire labyrinth. My aching back said, “Are you kidding? An eleven circuit labyrinth? Ten rings to go?”
“One step at a time,” my meditative brain said. “One step at a time.”
Step Six: Getting Some Help
We were still farming in the greenhouses near my home as the impact of the Covid restrictions hit. My employees needed as much work as they could get, but the farm’s winter sales were uneven. When the harvests were light, the guys would come over and help me dig the labyrinth. When we were busy on the farm the gestating labyrinth would quietly wait in its field for us to return. Meanwhile, back in the greenhouse, the tiny lavender plants were growing. We up-potted the seedlings from 250 cell trays to trays with bigger one-square-inch cells, and finally up to 4-square-inch pots.
Step Seven: Irrigation
When the eleven concentric paths were dug out, and the planting beds raised and smoothed off, it must have looked from above as though the field had a target carved into it.
I dug a ditch from the edge of the field that cut across the beds through the center of the labyrinth. I laid out a pipeline with half dozen risers, so I could connect up hoses for hand-watering or install a drip irrigation system.
Below the topsoil layer there’s a deep bed of water-retaining clay soil. I hoped after an initial “watering in,” the young lavender plants would be able to tap into that subsoil moisture. Then too, there’s subsoil moisture seeping down from the higher ground as the irrigation I provide for the citrus grove soaks into the soil.
I hope I won’t have to irrigate the labyrinth, but you never know, and the time to install irrigation is BEFORE the crop is planted, not as an afterthought.
Step Eight: Design
An outline of the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth gave us the blueprint for the map of our labyrinth. Starr made copies on sheets of paper that we could clutch as we marked out all the spots amid the concentric garden beds we’d cut or fill to create the sinuous pathway that guides a seeker to the center.
Starting from the outside, we began digging openings between the beds to create a path to the center and plug up some of the trench-like pathways to create the looping, labyrinthine path. We had the Chartres Cathedral’s maps in our hands to follow. How hard could it be?
As we dug our way to the center we kept bumping into dead ends or looping back on ourselves. We had created a maze! We had a laugh, took a rest, and returned the next day. And the next. On our third day, we made our way to the center of the labyrinth without cheating and hopping over the beds. Success!
We sat down in the calm center, looked back up the hill across the lemon orchard and took a deep breath. All that remained to do was . . .
Step Nine: Planting
I brought the 3000 little lavender plants over from the greenhouses, one variety at a time. There was still a lot of moisture locked up in the raised earthen beds so we marked out locations for each plant by removing a measured-shovelful of soil. Starr filled each hole with of water.
One by one she planted the little lavenders and smoothed the soil out around them. Our three cats came down the hill and watched her work with great interest. Wild turkeys and Valley Quail came in the evening to walk the labyrinth, peck at ants and seeds and sprouts and meditate on the changes to their field. The deer and the mountain lions looked through the wire mesh fence and wondered what fresh craziness we were up to.
Step Ten: Weeding & Watering
Watering didn’t turn out to be a problem. After two years, Starr has only watered a few struggling plants with a splash or two of water, and last year we didn’t water anything even once!
The lavender plants did indeed reach down into the subsoil and find the moisture they needed. The beds are raised high and the trench-like pathways are dug deep. Despite two very wet winters in a row, the lavender never flooded or died because of poor drainage. Weeds also thrived— especially the bindweed. We’ve spent plenty of time weeding the labyrinth but as the lavender plants grow the task gets easier.
Weeding the labyrinth is a frequent meditation for Starr and I, too. We poke along the beds looking for weeds and we enjoy the “om” buzz of the honey bees as they work the flowers for nectar.
Step Eleven: Sharing
Our labyrinth is a garden where we harvest lavender flowers. And it’s a work of art we created it to share. Our first event of this year will be our celebration of the 16th Annual World Labyrinth Day on Saturday, May 4th. The roses should be looking good then, too.
A lovely project, art and farming. It must be really wonderful to sit in the midst of the labyrinth with the lavender in bloom and well, just sit. Very cool.
While I appreciate the calmness and certainty a labyrinth provides I admit myself to being partial to mazes: for myself they seem more interesting, more like the "real world" with a diversity of paths etc. But that's just me! Back in 1990 I designed a large maze to be used for a single 24-hour period as a collection of rooms each with a different Virtual Reality project: http://twoalpha.blogspot.com/2018/10/cyberthon-blueprints-24-hour-virtual.html
Reading the email edition, I didn't see the (tiny font) attribution to Andy, so for a while there I thought you (Susie) had a whole 'nuther life I didn't know about, with a farm, a 25 year old son, a long-term partner named Starr, cats, and mountain lions... it was all very confusing and intriguing for a minute. Labyrinthine!