Erinae Lavender Farm

This was part of the garden I established.
This was how it looked when we bought the property
Several years down the track.
and again
This photo was featured in a tourism magazine, so the quality is not too good, but I like it.

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In 1989 we decided, for my then husbands family reasons, to move back to Victoria. I thought it would be good to live i n the country and that a Lavender Farm would be a good life style.

So we bought 3 1/2 acres of cow pasture, just outside of Mirboo North, bought an old house, had it transported to the site, where with a lot of help from my Brother-in-law, we renovated it and added another third to give us a decent kitchen, bathroom and more living space.

In between this we bought 3500, year old lavender plants, and planted them over two weekends, as they were bare root stock and had to get into the ground as soon as possible. Shannon our daughter was a teenager at this time and helped with the work.

Because of the slope of the ground, we enclosed under the rear of the house for a drying area, aplace for me to craft and a little shop to sell the lavender, lavender products and other craft that I made. We were open to the public. We also propagated and sold lavender plants. We had a shade house with about 1500 plants in it, when a storm with gale force winds lifted the legs, concrete blocks and all, out of the ground and twisted and mangled it as well as destroying everything inside.

A couple of years saw us become well known, we also needed much more drying space, as the lavender had flourished, so it was decided to build a tearooms, and larger shop for me.
It had exposed beams from which we hung thousands of lavender bunches, so it smelled heavenly, and was a lovely place to work. You could actually smell the lavender from a couple of miles down the road, and when it was in bloom, the whole hill was purple, and looked fabulous.

Shannon and I became quite knowledgeable about lavender and were able to give talks on it to the tourists. We only grew and sold a variety called "Lavendula angustifolia Miss Donnington", but we had a garden bed set out with 23 other varieties in it.

I had planted lots of decidous trees, and an extensive cottage garden. It was all fairly hard work, but very rewarding. About this time we had tourist buses coming, were catering for groups for lunches and afternoon teas, had enquiries about holding weddings, so the hard work was just beginning to pay off.

Then I had an accident, injuring my back and was no longer able to do the hard work, of weeding, bunching etc of the lavender. I had to have an operaton on my spine and while I was away in Perth convalescing, my husband decided the work was too hard and simply shut the gates. So the five years that we had spent getting established went to the people that we sold the farm too. It is still operating, and flourishing, we visit sometimes when we are back in Victoria, but it is hard seeing someone else reaping the benefit.

The delightful fragrance of lavender evokes beautiful memories of the 5 years we were at Erinae. While there I was often asked the meaning of Erinae, it is a biblical name meaning "peaceful place", which mostly it was.

In 1994, we moved back to Western Australia, and built a house in Bridgetown. The marriage only survived 2 more years, and my husband moved back to Victoria and I remained in beautiful Bridgetown, where my life has got better and better, but that is a story for another day.

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Some say life is a party, you join in after it has sarted and leave before it is finished.