Product Overview
Our organic Spike Lavender has a fresh, sharp, lavender-like, camphoraceous aroma with a dry herbal/woody undertone. It is an excellent choice for soapmaking due to its fresh, powerful scent and good stability.
Spike Lavender is one of the first essential oils to be commercially produced. In Ernest Guenther’s definitive six-volume set, The Essential Oils, he notes the mention of Spike Lavender from Provence, France by Hieronymus Brunchwig, a Strassburg physician whose famous book on distillation, written in the early 1500s, only refers to Spike Lavender, along with Turpentine, Juniper Wood and Rosemary.[1] Before industrialized farming and the deforestation that came with lumber trade, one can imagine the rolling hills of France, Spain and Italy blanketed with dozens of Mediterranean herbs, populated by majestic conifers and purpled by this attractive, low altitude species of Lavender – Lavandula latifolia.
It is this very species that meets and breeds with the high altitude true Lavender, Lavandula angustifolia, a coupling that produces the various high-yielding hybrids we call the Lavandins. What distinguishes Spike Lavender from both true Lavender and the hybrid Lavandins is the substantial percentage of 1,8-cineole, the same constituent found in Eucalyptus and Ravintsara, as well as camphor. Whether utilized in chest or muscle rubs, steams, or in skin preparations, make no mistake – this is not a calm variety of Lavender. Spike Lavender is also an excellent choice for diffusion or in the sauna. We feel it is an underrated and underused essential oil, most likely eclipsed by the popularity of true Lavender, but a most worthy one to discover.
1 Guenther, Ernest. The Essential Oils, Vol. I, 1948, p. 5.
