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At Naturallythinking we are proud to be associated with the Local Carshalton Lavender project, which is reviving the Lavender fields of Carshalton, Surrey, our home town.
Carshalton, Surrey was once the home of the worlds Lavender production, producing arguably the finest Lavender in the world. The Lavender is commonly known as "Mitcham Lavender", as the distillation plant used to be located on the Mitcham / Carshalton border at Figs Marsh. Indeed the Lavender fields stretched all the way from Wallington in the South to Mitcham in the North. A combination of competition from abroad, combined with demands for war time metal and then the post war London housing boom (the first large scale council estate was built at St Helier, Carshalton largely on the site of the Lavender fields), led to their demise. Towards the end of the 1990's local sustainable charity organisation, Bioregional started the revival project, claiming unused (often fly tipped) pieces of land and planting them with direct descendants of the original Lavender plants. These plants have been nurtured by community projects and harvested on an annual harvest event involving the whole community (for details of the next harvest click here), where everybody can get involved.
The Lavender produced is truly amazing, and you soon see why even the French admitted that Carshalton / Mitcham Lavender was the finest in the world. It is beautifully herbaceous giving a true feeling of the plant in all the products it is used. If Lavender has an "absolute" version, this would be it.
Increasingly, once again Carshalton is coming alive with the colour of Lavender and it is great for us to be able to use it and popularise it again.
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Aromatherapy 
