Lavender has a way of marking time.
At Deep Purple Lavender Farm in Embro, lavender farming is anything but easy. Like all flower farmers, they face the uncertainty of weather and changing seasons, hoping each spring that their perennial plants return healthy and produce the beautiful blooms visitors look forward to. July is lavender season, just as tulips have their spring and pumpkins have their fall. But through their harvest, Deep Purple Lavender Farm is able to capture the joy of lavender year-round. After the bloom and the harvest, is the time to create essential oils and incorporate them into beautiful body whips, face creams, soaps, and other products. Having an on-farm shop is one way we get to share a little piece of the lavender season with visitors throughout the entire year.
“It’s kind of like a school year,” said Donna Schurman, co-owner of Deep Purple Lavender Farm alongside her husband Chris. “There’s a start and there’s a stop. You always have something else to look forward to.”
That rhythm — plant, prune, bloom, welcome, harvest, blend, then start again — has carried the Embro couple from a modest corner of family land into one of Rural Oxford’s most-visited agri-tourism destinations, one bunch of lavender at a time.
The farm’s roots trace back to a piece of good fortune many families dream of: inherited land, and the freedom to decide what to do with it.
“We were blessed to have a family farm left to us, and the small plot of land at the bottom of the field gave us the opportunity to create something unique,” Donna explained. After having the soil tested, Chris dug into research on what could actually thrive there – and be profitable. The shortlist came down to two unlikely competitors.
“We ended up deciding between bamboo or lavender,” said Donna. “So we chose lavender.”
The couple started small and deliberate, putting in roughly 300 plants to test the waters. When that first crop performed well, the next move felt obvious.
“It was a no-brainer to add 3,000 more plants to the farm.” she chuckled.
That next year came with growing pains. One lesson Donna recalls is that Deep Purple was eager to diversify so they added French lavender to their lower field: roughly 800 plants of a notoriously finicky variety. Chris hadn’t yet completed his university course on being a lavender farmer and they hadn’t yet joined the Ontario Lavender Association where they would later learn from others who had seasoned experience working with lavender.
“Being green, we didn’t know that they needed to be covered,” Donna admitted. “We lost 800 plants our first year.”
It was a costly mistake, given how productive mature French lavender can be – a single established plant can yield 25 to 30 bunches, feeding directly into the farm’s oils and products. But that is the nature of running a business. Trying new things and learning as you go.
That hard-won experience shapes the advice Donna offers to anyone considering starting their own business.
“Take a chance, jump right in, but don’t quit your day job – right away,” she said. Having steady income to fall back on kept financial stress manageable while the farm found its footing, and owning the land outright meant no overhead to worry about.
“At the start, financially, what we put in was really just the cost of the plants, which we could manage,” she said. “I think it’s good to have a little bit of a backup plan.”
Deep Purple Lavender didn’t begin as a full-time leap of faith for Donna or Chris.
“Having a stable base enables us to grow and has added to our success,” said Donna. “We’re both still able to work off the farm and steadily grow our business.”
What started as a straightforward you-pick flower operation has since bloomed into something neither of them fully anticipated: a genuine agri-tourism draw pulling visitors from well beyond Oxford County.
“We’ve had people from places like Bethlehem and the Yukon come to visit,” Donna said. “It’s been so special to welcome people from within Oxford County and from around the world.”
Each visitor is asked to sign a guest book on the way through, and flipping back through its pages has become one of Donna’s favourite ways to reflect on time spent with the people who have travelled to visit the lavender farm. Whether she’s speaking to a hall full of people or leading a walking tour through the rows, she loves sharing the full arc of the story – how she and Chris met, how the family farm became a lavender farm, and how each plant travels from seedling to essential oil.
“I love that,” she said simply.
As for what’s next, Chris and Donna are choosing steady over sprawling. Rather than adding more infrastructure or expanding further, they’re planning to spend the next couple of seasons simply enjoying what they’ve built – welcoming visitors, keeping the farm open through the summer, and resisting the urge to take on the next big project.
“I told Chris this year that I wasn’t gonna make him build anything else here on the farm,” Donna said with a laugh. Looking back, she sometimes wishes they’d started decades sooner. “Probably hindsight, we probably should have started this 20 years ago when we were a little younger.” Retirement and succession are conversations for down the road. For now, the plan is to keep heading in the same direction – and to keep the calendar circled for opening day.
Mark it down: Deep Purple Lavender Farm’s 2027 season opens June 29th, with the first two weeks of July marking peak bloom and the best time to visit. After that, Donna says, Mother Nature takes over the schedule.
“Mother Nature kind of tells us when we need to get in the field and start harvesting,” she said. “We can’t leave it too long, or else we lose our opportunity to get our essential oils made for our products.”
For Donna, a lifelong Embro resident of 57 years, the appeal of doing business in Rural Oxford comes down to two things: the people, and the way local businesses lean on one another.
“The community and the outreach of friends, family, and our villagers around our area – we are so grateful for the support we’ve had,” she said. “Everybody was really excited when we were starting the farm to see how things would go.”
That spirit of collaboration has become part of the farm’s own summer programming. From the very beginning, other local businesses and organizers approached Donna and Chris wanting to team up.
“Right from day one, we had people coming to the farm wanting to do collaborations, or work together on things,” she said. Through July and August, the farm now regularly hosts art nights, yoga sessions, and private rentals alongside its own tours and events. “I think that’s the biggest thing.”
As the current season winds down, Donna is already looking forward to the next one – and to the simple pleasures that keep her rooted in the work.
“I just look forward to being out in the community and hanging out with folks and bringing our products to them too.”
Deep Purple Lavender Farm
Chris & Donna Schurman
355548 35th Line, Embro, ON N0J 1J0
Zorra Township
Established 2019
deeppurplelavender.ca
facebook.com/deeppurplelavender
@deeppurplelavender