Hokkaido's Lavender Season

Kamifurano's tourist association grades the bloom on a six-stage index, from tight green bud to a final stage it calls the purple carpet. In the early stages colour shows only at the tip of each spike, a violet cap over green. The middle stages fill inward and downward until the plant reads as more flower than stem. The last is the one the photographs chase: the field solid, the rows blurred into a single band of colour from any distance at all.

Most years put that final stage in the second half of July, in the ten days to a fortnight either side of the twentieth. The early strain, Nōshi Hayazaki, deep purple even in bud, colours first, from late June, and stays in flower the longest; Okamurasaki, the paler variety that covers most of the district and is grown for its oil, flowers from the middle of July into early August. In mid-July the two overlap, one passing its height as the other reaches it, so deep purple and paler, greener rows sit inside the same view.

The flower is grown for its oil as well as its colour. Distillers cut whole rows at the height of the bloom, when the oil in the flower heads is richest, and a working field in late July can show a band already cut to pale stubble beside a band still deep in flower, the harvest line running straight through what looks, from the road, like one unbroken slope of purple.

Weather changes the fields more than the calendar does. Bright sun sharpens the purple and lifts the scent within a few strides of the field's edge. Cloud softens the rows and lets the wheat and potato fields around them keep their own colour. Rain darkens the plant and turns the fragrance towards wet herb, nearer the real plant than any candle or soap. Wind moves through the stems in a low wave, slower and heavier than it moves through grass.

Lavender came to Hokkaidō by design. In 1937 the perfume maker Soda Aromatic imported five kilograms of lavender seed from France and sowed it in trials at five sites: Kitami and Sapporo in Hokkaidō, and Chiba, Nagano and Okayama on Honshū. Sapporo gave the best plants by every measure, growth, colour and fragrance alike. The island's summers were cool enough and its air dry enough for a plant bred for the hills of Provence, and after the war the crop moved out to the farmers of the Furano district, where commercial planting began in earnest in the early 1950s.

Farm Tomita, a family farm in Nakafurano, planted its first lavender for oil in 1958, and that first field of ten ares is still in flower there. Distilled, the crop yielded an essential oil sold to the domestic perfume trade, and cultivation across Hokkaidō reached its peak in 1970.

Then the trade collapsed. Imported oil and synthetic compounds that reproduced lavender's scent in a laboratory undercut it, and in 1973 the perfume companies stopped buying. Most farmers ploughed their fields under. In 1976 the Japanese National Railways put a photograph of Farm Tomita's fields on its national calendar, and photographers came north to find them, then visitors in numbers the oil trade had never seen. Kamifurano took lavender as its town flower, and a tourist trade grew where the perfume trade had been.

Okamurasaki, the variety most of the district grows today, is a true lavender prized for its long flower spikes, its strong scent and its yield of oil. It shares the summer with other flowers rotated through the same farmland on their own calendars: poppies and lupins in June, salvia and marigold in high summer, cosmos towards autumn. Lavender alone still carries the history of an industry that nearly vanished, kept alive because visitors now buy what the perfume trade stopped paying for.

Most of Japan is too humid and too warm through summer for lavender to keep its oil. The plant wants free-draining ground, low humidity and a dry heat it can shed by evening, conditions closer to a hillside above Marseille than to the wet, enclosed summers of Honshū. Hokkaidō supplies something close to that: winters cold enough to harden the plant, summers mild enough that the air rarely turns heavy, and volcanic soil that drains quickly after rain.

Latitude does most of the work. Kamifurano lies at 43 degrees north, almost exactly the latitude of the Valensole plateau in Provence, and its July days run to nearly fifteen hours of light, with nights that fall cool whatever the afternoon has done.

The scent outlasts the view. Growers bind small bundles for drying within hours of cutting, before the oil fades from the flower head, and the dry, resinous note of a Kamifurano field in July turns up weeks later in a paper sachet far from Hokkaidō, long after the hillside itself has gone to pale stubble.

Biei and Furano: the flower fields of summer → (opens in a new tab)

The Summer Tour of Hokkaido opens in this country, with two nights in the forest at Biei in a room with its own open-air onsen, the woods close outside the glass. A day is given to the lavender of Furano, taken slowly in the older fields away from the farm shop, and to the patchwork hills of Biei and the turquoise of the Blue Pond. The tour departs twice in 2027, from 25 June to 6 July and from 11 to 22 July.

From the lavender the journey drops south to Lake Shikotsu, the clearest lake in Japan, for two nights in a suite with its own onsen at the water's edge, then on to fireworks over Lake Toya and cold sea urchin on the Shakotan coast. It is limited to 8 guests, and its Tour Directors travel every mile of it beside them.