Pierre Grosso, An Italian Story

Patrizia Verza Ballesio

From The Lavender Bag 24 (November 2005)

During a visit to a nurseryman friend, specialising in lavender, he suddenly said: "I have found out that Pierre Grosso died about ten years ago at Cumiana". And soon he produced the book by Guido Mauro Maritamo Non si mangiava più… lassù (There was no food…up there) where he discovered this news.

This book gathers the direct evidence of the few still living emigrants and of their relatives, from the Chisone and Sangone Valleys in the south east of France during the twentieth century. The migration from Italy and especially from Piedmont to France began as long ago as 1850, rising to 420,000 people before the First World War. They were mostly employed as seasonal labourers: they came for the lavender harvest and then returned home to farm their own small pieces of land with one or two dairy cows. Migration fell during the two World Wars and then took up again between the wars and after the Second World War. In fact, from this period relationships with the local population improved more and more, and today about three million French are of Italian origin.

Pietro Grosso was born at Cumiana (Torino), in the village of Porta, on 27th February 1917. His father, Felice, was a worker at the FIAT car industry in Turin, but travelled as a seasonal worker to the south of France. Here he was a charcoal burner and a wood cutter, harvesting lavender at Revest-du-Bion and cultivating vegetables. Pietro Grosso was a teenager (fourteen or fifteen) when he began to follow his father as a seasonal worker. In 1935 Felice Grosso moved with his whole family to the Vaucluse region of France, because of the great poverty of the Italian alpine countries. Pietro Grosso had two sisters, Mariuccia and Tersilla. After the Second World War, the Grosso family lived permanently at Goult, where they ran a farm. They cultivated lavender and vegetables (particularly onions and asparagus), many kinds of fruits (mainly cherries) and a vineyard.

Pietro, now called Pierre, will continue to run the farm personally, until his parents are aged and his sisters married. He will continue to sell vegetables, driving his small van. He never married. The discovery of the new variety of lavandin was told by Pierre Grosso himself to Christiane Meunier in May 1985 and is reported in her book Lavandes & Lavandins (pp.69-70). Mariuccia, Pierre Grosso's sister, gives other details in Maritano's book.

Pierre began to cultivate lavandin from his arrival in France, at the beginning of the thirties. Probably at the beginning of the fifties, he found an old abandoned lavender field at Caseneuve, near Apt. Here, among dead plants, there was just one still living, a beautiful lavandin plant. He collected it, took some cuttings and in April the following year planted them out. He then began to produce and sell this new lavender. People bought the lavandin of the Grosso farm because it grew quickly and proved to be resistant to dépérissement, a progressive drying disease of plants, transmitted by insects. At the beginning of the seventies, Pierre Grosso decided to register his new variety at the Syndicat of Sault. From 1972-1975 the lavandin 'Grosso' began to be planted in preference to the variety 'Abrialii'. Now it represents about three quarters of the cultivated lavender in Provence and is one of the best known cultivars all over the world. Pierre's lavender farm went on to produce two or three millions cuttings a year, prepared by French and Spanish female workers.

But he continued to cultivate other products, especially onions. In 1989, feeling homesick, he returned to Cumiana, where he lived, looked after by his niece Marie Thérèse, until his death on 31 March 1996. But that is not the end of the story. This spring I found a new variety of 'Grosso' at the flower show in Masino, near Turin. It was labelled 'Grosso Seguret' and has been selected by a French nurseryman who found it in his field. I bought it and waited for its blooms. It seemed darker than 'Grosso', as the nurseryman had told me, but I'm not sure it really is a new variety.

References

Guido Mauro Maritano
Non si mangiava più… lassù (There was no food…up there) Edizioni Arti Grafiche SanRocco (Grugliasco-Torino)

Christiane Meunier (1985)
Lavandes & Lavandins (Edisud)

Note from the editor

I was intrigued by Patrizia's story as certain details of Pierre Grosso's life differed from the account in the monograph The Genus Lavandula (Upson and Andrews 2004), notably Pierre Grosso's dates of birth and death. The monograph gives the dates as 1905-1989, whereas Patrizia quotes 1917 - 1996. David Christie of Jersey Lavender was given as the source (pers. comm.) for the monograph account so I rang him up to ask a few questions. Here are the notes I made of that call.

David told me how he and his wife Elizabeth had met Pierre Grosso in Goult in 1989 on a trip to south west France. They had visited the Mairie in Auribeau to ask about lavender production in the area. Guy Jussian, the Mayor, was himself a lavender grower and David was invited to address local lavender growers that evening! He refused this kind invitation on the grounds of being unprepared and perhaps not being totally up to speed in French, but as they left, the Mayor suggested that they go and talk lavender with a Monsieur Grosso in Goult.

The Christies tracked Pierre down and found him living in very humble circumstances. David remembers that Pierre was sitting at table eating chestnuts off a white enamel plate with a blue rim, and with a bottle of very dark wine. With his sister acting as interpreter, Pierre told them the story of the lavender variety that bore the name of the family, a story which he had also told to Christiane Meunier for her book, published in 1985. David reported this visit to Susyn Andrews some years later when she was preparing the account of lavender cultivars for the monograph. By then, David felt, perhaps Pierre Grosso was either in extreme old age or was already deceased. (However, as we see from Patrizia's article, 1989 was the year that the old man had moved back to his roots in Piedmont and he was to live a further seven years.)

David and his wife returned to Goult last September (2005) and looked for Pierre's grave in the beautifully ordered cemetery there. There were two names listed under Grosso on the plan pinned up at the entrance, but when they found the graves, neither was Pierre's. I was able to tell David at this point that those two graves were almost certainly those of Pierre's parents, since he had never married and had no issue, and his sisters both married so would be buried under different names and would have had children also bearing surnames other than Grosso. "Was one of the graves for a Felice Grosso?" I asked. David conferred with Elizabeth and there was instant confirmation. Then David said he had a photo of the graves somewhere and offered to email it to me.

Talking to villagers, David had been surprised to learn that no one seemed to have heard of Pierre Grosso. He said he took them to task for not realising that arguably the most famous name in the lavender world over many countries was unknown in the village where the family had lived and worked for over fifty years.

Reference

The Genus Lavandula (2004)
T. Upson and S. Andrews The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew