Purple haze: Kent discovers essence of lavender

The hop fields of southern England are turning purple as farmers shift to growing lavender and other herbs to capitalise on the booming market in essential oils.

The hop fields of southern England are turning purple as farmers shift to growing lavender and other herbs to capitalise from the booming market in essential oils.

A dramatic decline in demand for hops used in beer making has led some enterprising farmers to switch crop ­ bringing a hint of Provence's famous lavender fields to rural Kent.

A global oversupply of hops ­ due to increased production in America, Germany and more recently China ­ has led to a collapse in prices. Beer making has also become more efficient and uses fewer hops for imparting aroma and bitterness to the beverage. As a consequence the area of land used to grow hops has fallen by 40 per cent over the last six years.

At the same time, lavender growing for essential oils has increased to cover more than 300 acres of the South-east's free-draining chalk soils. Three farms in the Darent Valley of Kent alone account for some 100 acres of lavender, complete with an on-site distillery to extract the valuable oil as soon as the flowers are harvested.

The National Hop Association of England reckons that hop growing has fallen from its peak of 72,000 acres in 1870 across 53 counties, to just 3,200 acres in just six counties. The association said that for five of the past six years hop growers have sold their harvest for a price lower than the cost of production.

William Alexander, who has a 1,000-acre mixed operation in the Darent, where he grows 90 acres of herbs for essential oils, 50 of which are lavender fields. Mr Alexander was one the first hop farmers to switch to lavender when he initiated a pilot growing scheme in 1998 with the aid of his co-operative, English Hops and Herbs Limited and its subsidiary Botanix.

"A key issue for lavender is that it has to be free draining. It is native in southern and central Europe around the Mediterranean and it often grows in a dry climate which is why it's got the oil," Mr Alexander said. "We've got flinty soil which is chalk based so when we get the winter and summer rains the water quickly soaks away from the roots."

Mr Alexander's lavender crop is not expected to come into peak production for another three or four years, when the plants are about eight years old. He has not grown hops for commercial beer making since 1999, a year after he began his lavender experiment.

Following a visit to the South of France, Mr Alexander decided to tap into the growing interest in essential oils and other herbal ingredients. "There's a growing market there, whereas hops is in decline and we were looking for something with market potential and there is this move and interest in natural products in all its forms," he said.

Lavender was first grown here by the Romans around 2,000 years ago and the fragrant essential oil is now used in cosmetics, household products, aromatherapy and pharmaceutical preparations.

The Kent farms are experimenting with two types of lavender, one called Lavandula angustifolia and the other, a hybrid plant, called Lavandula grosso. The grosso variety produces a cheaper oil and because it is a hybrid, cannot be classed as pure lavender oil but rather as lavandin.

Mr Alexander had brought a French lavender harvester to his farm to carry out this year's harvest. After the heads are cut they are taken from the field in a trailer to a distillery where steam is pumped through tubes running through the base of the pressurised trailer to heat the lavender. Oil and water come off as a vapour and are distilled into a separator vessel where the oil floats on the surface and is siphoned off, and the water is returned to a boiler to be reheated into steam. One trailer load takes about three or four hours to distil and the essential oil needs to mature for at least one year before it can be sold.

Dr Ray Marriott, a colleague of Mr Alexander, said: "Lavender is growing as well in Kent, if not better than it does in France. English growers are obtaining good yields and we can then process their crop using the traditional method of steam distillation to produce a pure, high quality oil. The crop can take up to three years to become established and provide optimum yields ­ we've been delighted with the quality of the oil."