We recently went to a lavender festival in an area called, confusingly, Cherry Valley. No cherries as such, but a billowing sea of lavender instead, made all the more surreal by its position in a vast, merciless desert, with windswept plains filled with tumbleweed and signs advertising pleasant and welcoming mortuaries. The air was different too. Gone was the hot, dry wind that smelt vaguely burnt in nearby Palm Springs. There was coolness and an endless waft of fresh lavender here, so different to dried, which makes me think of scones and English B&Bs and ‘granny’s pants’. By this I mean stored, clean pants from another era, washed with old soap and perhaps not dried fully, so, though clean, there is a suggestion of staleness.

A fresh sprig of lavender – or should I say ear because to me it has the same corn-like structure – is quite different. Camphorous, sultry and direct. It smells more like it looks: purple and lusty. It is known as a sedative, mainly, something you apply to yourself or a pillow to aid sleep, but according to the talk we attended, it is more of a balancing herb, bringing you back from the brink, settling you back into the centre of things. There were many other things growing, thriving in this oasis – thickets of tea tree, and a long avenue of broad-necked olive trees amongst them. But you couldn’t escape the lavender. We waded through it, running our fingers through the brittle stalks, letting them whip back against our thighs, crumbling the flowers between finger and thumb, enjoying their spiky scent and tight whorls of colour. We found a stall selling lamb kebabs and sat rather drunkenly in the sweet fug of lavender and smoky meat.
The night before we’d decided to visit a casino nearby. We walked in and I had to walk back out again. Noise, made up of music and machines merging like screaming sirens in vague counterpoint, cigarette smoke, cold, piped air, and the look of glassy appetite on the faces of the gamblers all combined to remind me why zombies are still such a resonant force in our culture. Nothing about it made sense to me. And there are no windows, and no clocks inside the place, so you lose any sense of where you are. Who you are, even. More tawdry still is the fact that the casino is built on an Indian reservation, a result of the deal made between Indian tribes and the federal government that allows the Native Americans ‘tribal sovereignty’. It feels, to me at least, like a bit of a crap deal.

So we needed the lavender the next day. I was wondering, looking around, if the same people at the casino the night before were here in this place. It was possible: there were lots of benign-looking elderly ladies at the casino, perched on stools, resting their sticks against the machines, handbags at the ready. And here they were too, with their cameras and grandchildren. I’m not sure how you could do that – how you could square that world with this one. Or how we can ignore the world beneath both, when the land belonged to the Native Americans, before cultivation and agriculture, and every tree, plant and herb was theirs.

Tea tree