The Arizona Lavender Festival

The weather forecast today for Phoenix was 119F and so Brent and I decided to skip the heat and travel about 187 miles north east to go to the Arizona Lavender Festival. That's a very long drive, I hear you say. Well, it is, but we have been otherwise occupied for a few years now and haven't really been out of town, so we enjoyed the ride.

We arrived at the Red Rock Ranch at about 10am and the weather was notably cooler.

We went to the gift shop first which can be seen to the far left of this house and we scooped up some 

lavender plants (complete with Yum Yum fertilizer), some essential oil, a cooking with lavender cookbook and a very pretty lavender mug with built in infuser. There were tons of people crammed in there as a cooking demonstration was about to begin, but we decided we already had our book, so we headed on outside.

Love this closeup of the door, it looks so pretty.

This picture is of the side of the house and it just looks so neat with those trees in front of it, rather like a bit of Provence.

Here's some close ups of the lavender bushes.

This is a field where you could go and pick your own lavender. I chose to buy my own plants and hopefully I'll be picking my own next year! 

A lavender field with fantastic shaped red rocks in the background.

This is one of the experimental sections where they grow different types of lavender and see how they come on. The plants were quite tiny. The owner, Mike Teeple, came out and gave a talk about how he bought the land 22 years ago and really, accidentally stumbled on how well lavender grew here at this high altitude. They have some of the best and purest lavender in the world here and I bought nine plants in all, a mixture of Provence and Grosso, so lets hope I don't kill them off!

For more information, go to http://redrockfarms.com/