Purple reign

Bridestowe Lavender Estate is a stunning exemplar of Tasmania’s tourism industry, but it took a lot of work and a bit of help from the Chinese to get it there.

Story Andrew Bain  Photo Bridestowe

Stand among the curling rows of lavender at Bridestowe Lavender Estate in north-east Tasmania in summer and it looks like a small parcel of purple. The lavender bushes cover just 44ha, but if you lined all the rows together, the 660,000 plants would stretch 200km, or about the distance from Hobart to Launceston. It’s often claimed as the Southern Hemisphere’s largest lavender estate, but that might even be understating it.

“We’ve never seen a bigger lavender field anywhere in the world,” says estate managing director Robert Ravens.

When flowering, this purple scene is one of the iconic images of Tasmanian tourism, with Mt Arthur rising beyond the lavender, and a 145-year-old oak tree standing sentinel over the rows. But when Robert first stood among these plants in 2007 as the new owner of the estate, the outlook was very different.

“When we bought it, it was very rundown and almost at the point of closure,” he says. “It was owned by a very large public company [Orica] and they didn’t want it. They liked it, but they couldn’t manage it. Imagine the world’s largest explosives company owning a lavender farm in northern Tasmania.

“In our years one and two here, you couldn’t see any lavender at all for weeds. It took us nearly 10 years to get the seed bank down to manageable levels.”