Zion Lavender Company made it into the pages of ViewOn Magazine's Home and Garden issue for July/August 2026. The feature covers our story from the very beginning, back when this was 500 lavender plants on a hillside and a lot of guesswork.
Dr. Alex Stojanoff started this farm in 2017 after buying property in Springdale, near the entrance to Zion National Park. He came to it from an unexpected direction. Trained as a reproductive scientist in Australia, he spent his career studying growth in a completely different context: embryos, not plants. But the underlying fascination carried over.
Before planting a single seedling, he did his homework the way a scientist would. He toured Bridestowe Lavender Estate in Tasmania, the oldest and largest lavender farm in Australia, and later saw lavender fields in Provence, France, up close. Those trips shaped how he thought about the farm before it existed.
The plants themselves, Lavandula angustifolia, came from nurseries in Seattle and Vermont. All 500 went into terraced ground behind the house, on hilly land with full sun, strong air flow, and fast draining alkaline soil low in nutrients. That combination turned out to be close to ideal for English lavender, even if getting there took some trial and error.
Distilling the oil was the hard part. Stojanoff describes it as the biggest challenge of building the farm, and he ended up consulting a specialist near Port Angeles, Washington, to get a suitable still. Everything else he taught himself.
A good day of distilling now produces around two hundred milliliters of pure lavender oil. The process also yields a hydrosol, the water byproduct of distillation, which works well on its own as an air freshener or antiseptic household cleaner. For carrier oils, we use almond, grapeseed, coconut, or jojoba depending on the product.
You'll find us at farmers markets around Springdale throughout the season, and online at zionlavenderfarm.com.
Thank you to Karen L. Monsen for the writeup, and to Bob Monsen for the photography that opens the piece. You can read the full feature in ViewOn Magazine's Home and Garden issue, starting on page 72.