Lavender on the Hill: Reflections from writer and poet Andrew Jackson

After the 2025 season, we were contacted by writer and poet Andrew Jackson of @thenewbuildmanifesto who kindly shared his reflections of visits to Yorkshire Lavender.

Grab a cuppa, settle in and let his writing take you on a journey of the senses ...

Lavender on the Hill: A Visit to Yorkshire Lavender near Castle Howard

In the soft light of a Yorkshire morning, where the Howardian Hills rise and fall like the folds of a sleeping animal, there lies a slope covered in violet bloom. From a distance, it might seem like a mirage — the shimmer of heat or haze on the hillside — but draw nearer and the illusion resolves into thousands upon thousands of lavender plants. This is Yorkshire Lavender, a family-run farm and garden near Castle Howard, a place where the cultivated and the wild share an uneasy but beautiful peace.

The hillside is south-facing, which gives it both warmth and light — rare qualities in this northern landscape. From its crest, the view tumbles away over the Vale of York, a patchwork of fields and hedgerows and slow-winding lanes. In summer, the air here is thick with scent: lavender, honey, grass, and the faint mineral tang of chalk dust rising from the dry soil. It is, in every sense, a sensory landscape — one that seems to breathe.

A Landscape of Scent and Place

To walk the lavender fields in June or July is to enter another kind of time. Bees hum like a soft current through the rows; butterflies drift lazily between the flowers; and somewhere, always, there’s the sound of the wind working its way up from the valley. The lavender itself — planted in curving, ordered bands — sways in the breeze like the surface of water. Its colours shift constantly with the light: silver at dawn, deep indigo by noon, lilac-grey when dusk begins to settle.

It is easy, here, to lose one’s sense of scale. The scent of lavender has that strange capacity to suspend thought, to carry you backward and inward at once. You begin to notice small things — the texture of a leaf, the heavy drift of a bee, the delicate structure of a flowerhead. You breathe more slowly. The field becomes less a place of production, and more a meditation — a space in which cultivation, ecology, and memory meet.

And yet this is very much a working landscape. The lavender is harvested, distilled, bottled; the oil used in soaps, lotions, sprays. There’s a small distillery where steam rises in fragrant clouds from the copper still, and the air inside smells like a cross between honey and mint. The product of all this labour — bottled scent, dried bundles, pots of balm — is tangible evidence of human industry. But standing among the plants themselves, one senses that the real work of the place is not in what it produces, but in what it invites: attention, reflection, the slow rediscovery of the land through the senses.

Between Cultivation and Wildness

Richard Mabey once wrote that “the line between nature and culture is not fixed but constantly negotiated.” Yorkshire Lavender is a vivid embodiment of that idea. Lavender is not native here — it’s a Mediterranean plant, more at home on the dry hillsides of Provence than in the wet, wind-shaped soils of North Yorkshire. Yet on this south-facing slope, where the chalk gives excellent drainage and the exposure brings warmth, it has found a surprising kinship.

The hillside, once grazed by sheep, now hums with a different kind of pastoral life. The bees, in particular, are the new livestock — diligent, tireless, communal. They thread their way between the rows in great murmuring clouds. The air vibrates with their purpose. When you pause, you can hear not a single hum but a layered orchestra of tones, each slightly out of pitch with the next. The sound is hypnotic: a chorus of the living field.

Around the main planting lie the other gardens — a lavender maze, a sensory garden, a sculpture trail where forms of stone and metal rise from the lavender sea. There are perennial borders too, full of hardy herbs and silver-leaved plants that share the same taste for dryness. The whole place is designed to awaken the senses: the feel of aromatic leaves, the sight of open sky, the hum of insects. It is both artifice and habitat, garden and field.

There’s something almost utopian in this balance — a reminder that human shaping of the land need not always diminish it. When done with sensitivity, cultivation can amplify what is already present, drawing out latent qualities in soil, slope, and light. Lavender may not have evolved here, but it has adapted, and in its adaptation has brought a new layer of life to the hillside.

The Human Layer

At the heart of Yorkshire Lavender is a family enterprise — practical, grounded, proud of its place. There’s a tea room that serves lavender scones and homemade cake, and a small nursery where visitors can buy plants to take home. The buildings are simple, functional: a mix of barn, greenhouse, and workshop. Yet everywhere there’s evidence of care — of hands that have tended, pruned, watered, distilled.

Visitors wander the fields, families with children tracing the maze, gardeners bending to smell a particular variety, couples lingering on benches looking out over the Vale. The mood is unhurried. You sense that time slows here not because of idleness, but because of absorption. People are engaged — in scent, in colour, in texture — and that attention seems to draw them closer to the place itself.

And yet, despite its hospitality, Yorkshire Lavender retains a sense of humility. It doesn’t feel curated in the glossy sense, or overly tidy. Paths meander where they will; the edges between planting and meadow blur. You find yourself walking from cultivated rows into rougher ground, where clover and knapweed take over, where the wild is beginning to knit itself back into the domestic. That meeting point — the place where order yields to spontaneity — is the true genius loci here.

Memory of Place

There is, in lavender, a curious doubleness. Its scent carries both the sharpness of camphor and the sweetness of summer. It is at once stimulating and calming, foreign and familiar. That duality mirrors something of the Yorkshire landscape itself — a region that has always stood between opposites: lowland and upland, field and moor, the domestic and the wild.

Standing on the hillside, watching the light shift over the Vale of York, you can sense the ghosts of older land-uses — the grazing flocks, the hedged fields, the oak woods long since felled. Lavender, a newcomer, overlays but does not erase that memory. Instead, it converses with it. Its roots thread through the same soil that once supported ryegrass and sheep’s-fescue, and the same sun that once dried hay now coaxes oil from lavender flowers.

It’s a reminder that landscape is never finished; it’s a palimpsest of human and natural stories, written and rewritten over centuries. In this sense, Yorkshire Lavender is less a plantation than a chapter — a new verse in the long poem of the Howardian Hills.

Lessons for the Gardener

What might a gardener — especially one shaping a new-build plot or urban edge — learn from this hillside? The first lesson is the power of unity through repetition. Lavender, used here on a grand scale, gives coherence to the land. It binds slope and sky together in a single gesture of colour and form. In a smaller garden, one could achieve a similar effect through repetition of a key plant or material — the silvery foliage of Artemisia, the sway of grasses, the blue haze of Nepeta.

The second lesson is about relationship to place. The success of Yorkshire Lavender lies not in forcing the land to conform to a vision, but in finding what it naturally offers — light, slope, drainage — and working with it. Lavender thrives here because the conditions echo its ancestral home. In any garden, understanding that fit between plant and place is the foundation of beauty and resilience.

Third, there’s the lesson of hospitality to life. The lavender fields hum with insects because they have been allowed to. There’s no sterile tidiness, no over-control. The rows may be neat, but they coexist with rough margins, wild patches, meadows, and wind-tossed banks. This permeability — between cultivated and uncultivated — is what gives the place its vibrancy. In a garden, the same principle applies: leave edges soft, allow wildflowers to seed, make room for bees and butterflies.

And finally, there’s the lesson of scent and memory. To walk through the lavender is to experience the garden through the nose as much as the eye. We too often design gardens visually, forgetting that scent connects us more directly to emotion, to memory, to belonging. A lavender hedge by a doorway, thyme between paving stones, the resinous breath of pine — these are the things that make a garden live in the senses.

The Quiet Ecstasy of Being Present

In Mabey’s writing there’s always an undercurrent of reverence for the overlooked — the weed in the verge, the bird in the hedge, the way light shifts across a field. Yorkshire Lavender invites that same kind of noticing. It asks nothing more than that you be present: to look, to listen, to breathe.

On a still day, if you sit quietly on one of the benches near the top of the slope, you can hear the landscape moving around you. The wind brushes the stems with a dry whisper; bees thrum in their endless circuits; somewhere in the distance a tractor passes, the sound softened by air and distance. And beneath it all — beneath the noise and bustle of life — there is a deep, almost geological calm.

You begin to feel the slope as an organism: the plants exhaling oxygen, the soil breathing moisture, the light shifting as though it too were alive. The distinction between observer and observed starts to blur. You are no longer simply in the landscape; you are of it.

A Poetic Ending

Late in the day, when the light turns golden and the shadows lengthen across the rows, the lavender fields take on an almost otherworldly glow. The bees grow sluggish; the scent intensifies; the valley below drifts into haze. Standing there, watching the day fold itself into evening, you understand something of why people are drawn to such places.

They are not merely picturesque, or restful, or commercial. They speak to an older instinct — the desire to be in communion with land and life. To smell the earth and feel, if only for a moment, that the world still holds space for stillness, for growth, for belonging.

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Our huge thanks to Andrew for sharing his evocative writing. Find out more about Andrew's work.