SEQUIM — It feels like the south of France, except she was greeted with cheers in American English, got to hang out with Dad and found that “everyone’s happy.”
So goes Val Ferris of Seattle’s rave review of her fourth consecutive Sequim Lavender Festival, which included a stop at the Port Williams Lavender farm with her father, Dick Conger of Sequim.
“It is just amazing,” the way Sequim has grown itself into a lavender mecca, Ferris said, breathing in the scented breeze.
“It’s like we’ve got France in our backyard,” only with cheerleaders offering a small-town American welcome.
Sequim cheerleaders
When Ferris and family drove downtown where the Lavender Central street fair and Sequim Open Aire Market are putting on a multisensory show, the Sequim High School cheerleaders invited them into the school’s parking lot at 601 N. Sequim Ave.
Then came the sharp moves and the chants of “Go Wolves.”
The Lavender Festival, see, is an enormous team effort, and the cheerleaders seized the opportunity to not only help visitors find parking but also raise money for their uniforms fund.
“We’ve done very well,” said Sequim High ninth-grader Annika Lawrence, 14.
Her father, Lee Lawrence, reported that on Friday, the festival’s first day, the cheerleaders had reaped more than $1,500 toward new purple ensembles.
And while throngs flowed through the street fair, the outlying farms remained relatively serene.
Port Williams’ violet field seemed to stretch to the horizon, and it attracted people from across Western Washington.
Among them were three generations of Shana Contreras’ family: herself and her 19-month-old son, Nico, and his grandmother, Jill Beven of Sequim.
Contreras, who drove over from Federal Way, was like other visitors when she sought to explain lavender’s allure.
“It’s just . . .” she murmured, looking out over a field of royal velvet, one of the deepest-purple varieties.
Real men
At the Cedarbrook Lavender & Herb Farm, 1345 S. Sequim Ave., the garden and gift shop teemed with girls, women and “Real men grow lavender” T-shirt-wearing guys such as Jesse Mooney.
At 18, he’s a manager at Cedarbrook, Washington’s oldest herb farm. And he’s not shy about his penchant for a particular plant.
“It looks so cool and it smells so good. The combination is like, wow,” Mooney said, as women lined up to purchase young lavender plants.
And with 125 varieties growing around him, he believes there’s one for every landscape.
When Seattleites ask him if the herb will grow in their rainy city, he says yes, but “you just have to work a little harder” than Sequim’s gardeners.
As for using this herb in cooking and baking, Mooney is all for it. He’s become a connoisseur of cookies and candy laced with lavender, and said that once your palate discovers this flavor, “you kind of miss it when you don’t get it.”
More activities today
The curious, and the hungry, will have opportunities today to explore lavender’s kitchen uses at all seven of the farms on the festival tour.
At Cedarbrook, chef Christine Withers will appear at the garden grill to show visitors how to make a four-course lavender meal; at Port Williams Lavender, 1442 Port Williams Road, Tom Heintz of the Sauer Kraut will demonstrate his grilled salmon with lavender-dill sauce.
Jardin du Soleil, 3932 Sequim-Dungeness Way, will feature the Red Lion of Port Angeles’ Joseph Mollerus demonstrating a lavender-spice-rubbed pork tenderloin; Purple Haze, at 180 Bell Bottom Road, will have chef David Long of the Oven Spoonful creating a sauce with the farm’s Herbes de Provence mustard; and at Lost Mountain Lavender, 1541 Taylor Cutoff Road, Bell Street Bakery chef Roger Stukey will discuss the finer points of baking with lavender and other herbs.
The Olympic Lavender Farm, 1432 Marine Drive, will feature Sugarplum Designs’ Mary Ann Clayton teaching visitors how to turn fresh lavender into a purple elixir for syrups and preserves; and at Sunshine Herb & Lavender Farm on U.S. Highway 101 east of Sequim, Carmen and Steve Ragsdale will turn plain chicken into lavender-apricot chicken and prepare their signature lavender-smoked ribs.
Tickets to the Lavender Festival farm tour, open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today, are $15, or $10 for military service members and dependents while children 12 and younger are admitted free.
The street fair and adjacent Fun on the Field on West Fir Street, where some 175 vendors offer art and food to go with the live music, are open until 6 p.m., and admission is free for all.
Details on all events, including a schedule of the farm-tour buses and the bands playing at the street fair and farms, are available at www.LavenderFestival.com.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com
