Mayfield Lavender was started when Brendan Maye was employed as Managing Director of the fine fragrance division of Wella UK. One of the brands in the portfolio was Yardley. This had been bought out of receivership by Wella and then added to the other fragrance brands such as Gucci, Dunhill, Ghost, Anna Sui, Escada etc. Brendan had worked for Yardley previously and obviously recognised that the brand has become very old and dusty. Through the work Brendan was doing on the other fragrance brands he recognised that the brand could not be revived by advertising alone as consumers would not accept that Yardley could modernise. Brendan felt that people needed to witness the beauty of Lavender to accept that it is a relevant fragrance for today. Brendan approached the board in Germany with a proposal to buy a farm and revive lavender growing under the Yardley brand in Surrey – its traditional home in England. This was rejected as the board felt that farming was not the core business of Wella!
In the subsequen two years Brendan again made the proposal to the board of Wella to buy a farm but the idea was rejected until the board finally accepted that the idea would not be dropped. So Brendan received the go-ahead to get involved in Lavender growing but was still prohiited from actually buying a farm.
To overcome this restriction Brendan commissioned an environmental charity called Bioregional Development Group to help get the lavender planted.
in 2002 Bioregional leased the land from Sutton Council (Brendan privately underwrote the lease) and Yardley sponsored the planting of the lavender. In the first year half the field was planted with the English Lavender variety called Folgate. However unexpectedly Magpies and Crows pulled all of the newly planted plugs out of the ground destroying almost 70,000 pulgs. Brendan decided that the project should continue and the following year half of the field was again replanted with Folgate. This was successful and in 2004 the second half of the field was planted with 2 further varieties – an English Lavender called Maillette and one Lavandin called Grosso.
In 2005 Wella was bought by Procter and Gamble. One of the first decisions that P&G took was to sell Yardley. The acquiring company had no interest in the sponsorship programme choosing instead to focus on export business for Yardley. At this point Brendan was managing the integrated fine fragrance portfolios of P&G and Wella with many new licensed fragrance brands such as Lacoste and Hugo Boss to manage. BioReginal approached Brendan to explain that the project was unsustainable without sponsorship support. Brendan initially declined further involvement due to the intensity of workload but on a subsequent discussion agreed to acquire the project from BioRegional as a personal investment to ensure that the Lavender growing project would not simply die away.
Having made the commitment to acquire the project from BioRegional two issues were clearly evident. What is involved in farming 25 acres of organic lavender 2. Who is going to manage it? Brendan’s wife Lorna was reluctant to get involved initially but came to the rescue and soon became the leading face of what was to become Mayfield Lavender. It was Lorna’s heroic commitment during the summer of 2006 and 2007 that sustained the project. She quickly learned how to manage and harvest Lavender as well as all the logistics of co-ordinating the distillation and the product sales from the field. In 2007 Brendan was given additional responsibility by P&G to include Italy Holland and Belgium as well as the direct management of the UK and Irish business. The extensive international travel and the compromise that it entailed in trying balance the business pressures and simultaniously to have time for a young family led Brendan to decide to leave P&G in Decemember 2007.
Brendan and Lorna now work together to nurture and build Mayfield Lavender and are committed to the organic management of the field and are very proud of the fact that the field sits on the exact spot where lavender was grown in the 18th and 19th century. Since the lavender is grown without the use of herbicides or pesticides they are also following in the tradition of the original lavender growers. Mayfield Lavender is often confused with a small allotment project locally and is often referred to as Carshalton Lavender or Mitcham Lavender.
“Our aim is to develop an environmentally sustainable business that can prosper without costing the Earth! As well as following the principles of organic farming as set out by the Soil Association, we are encouraging biodiversity on our field; we have allocated significant perimeter land for the wild seeding of native flower species and as a consequence the field is thriving with a rich variety of flowers and wildlife.
It is our hope that the work that we are doing will be appreciated and supported by the public. If we are succesful it is one of the few projects where there is a geniune benefit for everyone.”
Where our field can be found Click for map
