Most lavender fields are blue and purple all the way across. Melissa is the row that is not.
Its flowers open close to white and then soften into a blush pink as they mature, so at any point in the season you can see cream buds, pale flowers and pink together on the same plant. Set against the deep blue of Superblue and the grey-violet of Grosso, it is the row visitors stop at first and ask about.
It is also the one we call our Treasure, and that name is arithmetic rather than marketing.
Melissa is a lavender, not lemon balm
Worth clearing up first, because the name is shared and the confusion is common. Melissa officinalis is lemon balm, a completely different plant in the mint family, and it is often sold under the single word “Melissa”.
Ours is Lavandula angustifolia ‘Melissa’, an English lavender cultivar. If you are comparing labels or looking up a scent profile, that distinction matters. Beyond a shared hint of citrus the two smell nothing alike.
There is a second name to watch for as well. Melissa Lilac, sold under the cultivar name ‘Dow4’, is a separate lavender selection with more lilac-toned flowers. It is not the same plant. What grows in our field is ‘Melissa’.
Where it came from
Melissa began as a colour variation on a ‘Munstead’ lavender seedling, spotted and selected by Van Hevelingen Herb Nursery in Oregon during the 1990s. The nursery named it after their co-founder, Melissa Van Hevelingen.
So it is a relatively young cultivar, and a regional one. That is part of why you see far less of it in fields than you see Grosso.
Pink flowers on a grey-green plant
Melissa grows as a bushy evergreen shrub with narrow, aromatic, slightly grey-green leaves. A mature plant runs somewhere around half a metre to a metre across and high, depending on the soil and how it has been pruned.
The flowers sit on slender stems of medium length. They come up almost white, then take on soft pink and pink-mauve tones as they open, which is what gives an established Melissa planting its layered look rather than a single flat colour.
A citrus lift
The nursery that selected it describes Melissa as sweetly fragrant. What we notice in our own field is a soft floral scent with a lift to it that reads as citrus.
That citrus impression is how the plant smells to us here, not a chemical specification. Fragrance moves with climate, soil, when the flower was cut and how it was distilled. What is consistent is that Melissa is lighter in the nose than Grosso, and brighter than the honeyed sweetness of Superblue. Put the three oils in front of someone blind and Melissa is usually the one they pick as the bedtime one.
Why there is never much of it
Melissa yields very little oil for the volume of flower it takes. A run through the still that would fill several bottles of Grosso oil produces a fraction of that in Melissa.
That is the whole reason for the nickname. Every bottle is a limited harvest and a careful distillation, and it is why Melissa shows up in our smallest-batch products rather than across the entire range.
We treat that as something true about our farm rather than a fixed property of the cultivar everywhere. Oil yield shifts with growing conditions, plant health, when you cut and how you distil. On our ground, in our years, this is what it does.
When it blooms
At our Richmond farm, Melissa typically flowers from early July to mid-September. Horticultural references elsewhere put it as an early to midsummer cultivar, and the gap between those two descriptions is exactly how much local climate matters.
Because the timing shifts a little every year, check the bloom calendar before planning a visit around a particular cultivar. Our guide to when lavender blooms in BC has the month-by-month picture.
Like other English lavenders it prefers full sun and freely draining soil, and it tolerates dry conditions once it has settled in. Prolonged wet ground will damage it.
What we make with it
On the farm, Melissa is harvested and steam-distilled in small batches for essential oil and hydrosol. Both are sold by cultivar, so you can put Melissa next to Superblue and Grosso and compare them directly. The 5 ml oil exists largely so that comparison does not cost very much.
Melissa can be used as a culinary lavender elsewhere, but it is not the one we grow for food. Everything in our culinary and pantry range is Superblue, which is grown, cut and handled for the kitchen from the start.
How it compares to our other two
- Melissa is English lavender with a citrus lift, pink-flowering, and our smallest harvest. The bedtime one.
- Superblue is also English lavender, sweet and honeyed and low in camphor. The culinary one, and the gentlest on skin.
- Grosso is a lavandin. Bold and herbaceous. Best for drying, for linen and for rooms.
Choosing between oil and hydrosol rather than between cultivars? That is a different question, answered here. For the wider family, see types of lavender.
Find the pink row
Melissa is not the lavender we harvest most of. It is the one people remember.
When it is flowering, look for the slender spikes that come up almost white before turning blush. Stand beside that row, then walk to the Superblue and the Grosso, and the differences that sound subtle written down stop being subtle at all.