Salagon, Forcalquier and Lavender

On Monday, July 27th, we went to the porch of the main house, overlooking the pool, and sat down to a wonderful breakfast, served by Annie and her husband, Jean-Claude. They, like Karine, had apricot jam with lavender seeds--not something you would find in Minnesota!

Afterwards, we got into Francois and headed down the D943 to Apt. We turned onto the D900, heading east. While still in town, we tried to stop at the post office, but traffic was so heavy and parking so scarce that we gave up and continued onward. The principal reason we needed to find a post office was because while we were in Zug I found, in my pocket, the key to room 6 at Pension Gimmelwald. We had not yet had time or opportunity to mail it back, though I had been exchanging very pleasant, very low-key, very British-understatement e-mails with Phil at the Pension, on the order of: "We'll get it back to you as soon as we can." "Thanks very much. That would help, since it's the only key we have for that room. Old house."

We were on our way to Forcalquier, one of the few places in the area where there is a Monday market. The traffic on the D900, a two-lane highway, was bad, full of trucks. Annie had suggested that we stop at Salagon. In medieval times, Salagon was a very minor monastery, with a small church.

Now, the priory is a museum, the 11th-century church, with medieval sculpture and paintings and 20th-century stained glass by artist Aurelie Nemours, is interesting, but the place is mostly known for its gardens. As the Salagon website says: “With 1,700 plants, this green idyll has so much to communicate. Salagon gardens have been created on ethnobotany principles and laid out to fit the site's agricultural history. They show the relationship between humans and the plants around them: the way plants are used, knowledge about them, representations of them, etc. They are also an aesthetic creation, an educational tool and a facility for the conservation of plants and knowledge.”

We spent most of our time in the medieval garden, which exhibits plants that were not brought over from the New World. Mary Joy, our household's gardener, liked Salagon, but I’ll have to say that it left me rather lukewarm.

It was only a few minutes’ drive from there to Forcalquier. Though it was after 11 a.m., the market was still going full blast, and we had to park Francois out of town and walk in.

We ended up buying a few things for gifts--fruit tea and some packets of lavender--as well as a picnic lunch: some quiche slices, apricots and local cherry juice. Then we had our picnic on a streetside bench a block or so from the market. Problem that I had foreseen as a possibility: opening the bottle of cherry juice without a bottle opener or without my Swiss Army knife (left in the U.S. because we didn’t check luggage and, as I had experienced at Beijing Airport in 2002, airport security frowns on one absent-mindedly carrying a Swiss Army knife in one’s carry-on bag). Solution: use a ballpoint pen.

We looked into the church, and then went all the way up to the citadel, destroyed in 1601 and now surmounted with a chapel built, like Fourviere and Sacre Coeur, in the 1870s.

We had dessert at a creperie, principally in order to use the toilet. A creperie in France is a café that serves specialties of Britanny, such as crepes, galettes (crepes that are savory rather than sweet) and hard apple cider, just as a brasserie is a restaurant specializing in Alsatian fare (beer, sauerkraut, onion tarts, etc.). Mary Joy had a walnut crepe while I had a fruit crepe and some Breton cider. This was, of course, cheating, since we should have been eating Provencal specialties instead. The market had, by then, disappeared, almost by magic, when the clock had struck one.

We headed out of town northwest, toward Sault (pronounced “So”), which seemed like an interesting town, in the heart of lavender-growing country. The drive was pretty (it’s mostly marked in green on the Michelin map). Just before Sault, we turned off at St.-Trinit, because the Michelin Green Guide to Provence said that the church there “is a fine example of Romanesque architecture in Haute Provence.” First, we had trouble finding the church, then we had trouble getting near it, so we just continued on. As we approached Sault, we started seeing blue-purple fields of lavender. The fields seemed to be a little past their blooming prime, but were pretty nonetheless.

When we got into town we drove around, looking vainly for a parking place—Sault, which we had never heard of before doing research for this trip, was overflowing with people, including Chinese or Japanese on tour buses. This was lavender season, and Sault is the capital of lavender, home of an annual Lavender Festival in early August. Eventually, we gave up and headed out of town, but even that proved problematic. We wanted to start out heading south toward Apt on the D943, but couldn’t find it. If I’d had time to stop and sort it out, I could have figured out from the map, as I eventually did, that D943, heading south, must peel off from D1, which heads west, and not from D30, which goes southeast with signs saying “Apt,” but which doesn’t go anywhere near St.-Saturnin.

So, after several false starts, we got on D943 and started climbing up the Vaucluse Plateau, stopping at a scenic turnout to look back.

At St.-Jean-de-Sault we turned onto the D230, to continue up over the plateau. Lavender proper, unlike the hybrid, lavandin, which isn’t as intense and is used in soaps, etc., can only be cultivated at relatively high altitudes—such as on the Vaucluse Plateau. We hadn’t gone very far before we came to a large roadside stand, covered with lavender and lavandin products—oils, soaps, sachets, etc.

Tending it was a young woman who was about eight months pregnant. She said that it was all grown right there—the fields were around us and the farm buildings were across the road, including a distillery. Her husband was over there, she said, so why didn’t we go over and have a look? So, after Mary Joy picked up some more gifts, we drove across the road, parked and looked into the shed where harvested lavender was fed into vats.

We continued on D230, gradually climbing to the high point, 998 meters (around 3300 feet), then gradually went back down again, through what looked like olive groves, until we came to the edge of the plateau and dropped down on switchbacks, with the long, low Luberon Mountain in scenic sight across the valley to the south.

Before getting all the way down to St.-Saturnin (below 400 meters in altitude—around 1300 feet) and rejoining D943, we stopped at an old, stone windmill above the town.

There was a small group of people already there (not Americans), being addressed by some longwinded person who appeared to be a guide of some sort. I don’t remember what the language was—probably French, but I didn’t pay enough attention to pick out any tidbits of information.

After getting back to our room, we decided to eat again in town—L’Estrade, down the street from St. Hubert, had better reviews on Tripadvisor, and the menu, which we had looked at the night before, appeared interesting. Two restaurants outside of town, with very good reviews, had left their cards in our room, but neither was open on Monday. It turned out that L’Estrade wasn’t either. The pizza place down on the corner with the highway was full. So we ate again at St. Hubert, which was listed in Lonely Planet for its hotel, not for its restaurant. This time, I had the fish, which was good. I don’t remember what Mary Joy had.

At one point or other we used the ATM down the street, closer to the highway. We ended up using this machine twice while we were there, in spite of the fact that the screen display was malfunctioning—there was a border down the middle and the right half of the display was over on the left side of the screen, and vice-versa. This meant that the labels for the touchscreen buttons were next to buttons that did something else—i.e., “Cancel” instead of “Approve.” Once we had figured this out, it only required some mental dexterity to keep the true labels in our heads and press the correct buttons to get our euros.