It’s early summer in Australia: time for the fields of lavender to begin blooming.

This one’s in rural Victoria province, not too far north of Melbourne.

According to Wikipedia, the lavenders (Lavandula) are a genus of 39 species of flowering plants in the mint family, Lamiaceae. An Old World genus, is distributed from Macaronesia (primarily the Cape Verde and Canary Islands and Madeira) across Africa, the Mediterranean, South-West Asia, Arabia, Western Iran and South-East India.

It is thought the genus originated in Asia but it is most diversified in its western distribution.

Photo ©2005 by Susan McKee)