WHEN TO VISIT PROVENCE?
Timing the south of France
Let's begin with the thing almost nobody tells you until you've already booked the flights. If you are coming to Provence for the lavender, the great purple corduroy fields that launched a million screensavers, you have to come at a very particular and rather narrow moment, and it is probably not when you think.
The lavender blooms roughly from the last week of June through July, with the best of it in the first half of July. The famous Valensole plateau, the rows leading to the Abbaye de Sénanque near Gordes, the high fields around Sault: all of them are at their peak in that short window, and then, with the tidy indifference of agriculture, they are harvested. By August much of it has been cut. By September it is gone entirely, and the fields are neat brown stubble that photographs like a bad haircut. We have watched more than one visitor arrive in early September with a very specific picture in their head and a slowly dawning look of betrayal on their face. Nobody had told them. So, we are just letting you know...
Here is the fork in the road.
IF THE LAVENDER IS THE DREAM
Come in the first two weeks of July. Accept that you are arriving in high summer, which means heat that means business, more people, and higher prices. Base yourself near the fields that matter to you, because they are not all in one place, and go early in the morning when the light is soft and the tour buses are still at breakfast. If a purple field is the image you have been carrying around for years, this is the trip. Just go in with your eyes open, and book everything well ahead, because you are not the only one with that photograph saved.
IF YOU WANT ANOTHER OPTION TO CONSIDER
Come in September or October. This is our choice for a longer stay, it is the season the guide is built around, and we will happily make the case.
The weather in these months sits somewhere around 18 to 26 degrees Celsius, which is to say warm enough to swim and cool enough to walk all afternoon without wanting to lie down in a fountain. The vendanges, the grape harvest, fills the vineyards with a purposeful energy in late September that no summer visit ever touches, and if you turn up at the right cellar at the right moment, someone may pour you a glass of something that isn't on any list yet. Late October cracks open the first of the truffle season. And the light, the specific golden afternoon light that pulled Cézanne and Van Gogh and half the painters of Europe down here in the first place, lasts most of the day rather than arriving for a polite hour at sunset.
Best of all, the crowds thin by something like 40 to 60 percent from the August peak. The villages stop performing for tourists and quietly return to being villages. The markets go back to being for eating rather than for souvenirs. A woman opens her shutters at nine in the morning and there is no one in the square to watch her do it but you. This, more than any field, is the Provence people fall in love with.
A FEW SEASONS IN BRIEF
Spring (April and May) is green and flowering and lovely, with the lavender still weeks away and the light not yet at full strength. High summer (July and August) is hot, busy, expensive, and the only time for the lavender, so make your peace with the trade. September and October are some of the finest weeks of the year here. November onward turns quiet and shuttered and rather beautiful in its own austere way, but many restaurants and small hotels close, so it is a trip for a particular temperament.
THE HONEST CONCLUSION
Provence will not be rushed and it will not be faked, and the biggest favor you can do yourself is to match your expectations to your calendar before you book, rather than after you land. If you are looking for the purple fields, come in early July and enjoy every hot, glorious, and people’d minute of it. If what you want is the light, the food, the wine at harvest, and the villages with their guard down, come in the golden weeks of autumn, when the lavender is only a rumor and everything else is at its absolute best.