Color me pastel purple

Jim Casey

There’s something to be said for the Sequim Lavender Festival. It’s just taken me several years to figure out how to say it.
My first visit to the celebration in 2005 as a Peninsula Daily News reporter was cut short by the discovery of Clallam County Assessor Linda Owings Rosenburg’s suicide. I was obliged to cut short a tour of lavender farms to report on the tragedy.
Since then and until now, my visits were limited to perusing what may be the world’s longest avenue of little white tents, known locally as the Street Fair.
It was there I first experienced a feeling of unreality, a suspicion that I might find myself walking a Purple Brick Road wearing spectacles with lavender lenses.
I’d never realized so many things can be done with lavender — soaps, scents, oils, flavorings, bouquets, wreaths and even dog collars, to name a few — and these are just the uses to which the herb can be put in public.
It also has been hard thinking of lavender as actual agriculture. To this Illinois boy, a cash crop is knee high by the Fourth of July and it’s harvested by burly men driving immense machines to be stored in towering elevators until it’s hauled away in huge railroad cars.

Too pretty to pick
But lavender? Its perfect hemispheric bunches are, well, cute, as are sleeping babies and tiny dogs and certain cartoon characters.
It’s almost too pretty to pluck.
Yet the most disconcerting aspect of this whole we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore epiphany was that lavender is wholly an object of completely discretionary spending.
I mean, nice as it is to look at and smell, it’s hardly an essential commodity. No one collects money to send bundles of lavender to the deprived people of Third World countries. And I doubt that any villainous speculators are trying to corner the market of lavender futures.
Let’s face it: Although its care and harvesting doubtless is hard work, lavender is almost pure fun. It’s the perfect crop for a community that’s reinventing its agricultural status.
I mean, show me another town whose abandoned grain elevator has been co-opted by a Mexican restaurant.
It’s the crop of cognitive dissonance.
Lavender, the plant and the festival, also is big news in Sequim. The event is one in which the Gazette enthusiastically participates.
Mind you, it’s not news of the same stripe as, say, Mike McAleer sporting an Obama in ’12 bumper sticker or feuding city councilors holding peace talks in Paris.
So at last week’s news staff meeting, I advised the Gazette’s reporters to buy into the spirit of the celebration and to enjoy themselves as they fanned out to the Street Fair, farms and dinner.
I also elected to take my own advice, breathe deeply of the herb’s heady scene and explore this curious lavender culture.

Simply splendiferous
My first stop was the Street Fair, scene of the annual Parade of People who Ought Never, Never, Ever to be Seen in Shorts.
It’s also home to scores of artists and craftspeople who together compose the best arts and crafts fair in Clallam County. No cheapjack gimcracks here, folks, just quality and often unique merchandise.
So good was the fair that I was surprised to find other vendors of comparable quality at the three farms I managed to visit — Lost Mountain Lavender, Cedarbrook Lavender & Herb Farm, and Sunshine Herb & Lavender Farm — courtesy of Clallam Transit’s shuttle service.
It was here on Saturday that I began to appreciate the immense effort that goes into each farm’s contribution to the festival and the year of work that the Sequim Lavender Growers Association puts in to coordinate it all.
Add to that Jazz in the Alley, all the other live music at the farms and the fair, the culinary celebration, the Totem Tour, quilt show, theater production, driftwood sculptors show, winery tour, golf tournament and other spin-off events and you have a truly big league celebration.
So, the something to be said for the lavender festival turns into several separate but related things:
1. Whooooeeee!
2. Well done, everyone.
3. I’m looking forward to the 2010 edition.
4. Most of all, two words that are insufficient for the task but nonetheless sincere:
Thank you.

Jim Casey is the editor of the Sequim Gazette.