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Michelle Ducworth stands in a field of lavender at Twin Creeks farm, which she started near Williamston on land where her father used to raise cattle, following in the farming footsteps of generations before him.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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Twin Creeks’ U-Pick season lasts for several weeks in June, when visitors can clip their own stems of seven varieties of lavender.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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Adrianna Sowash, left, helps her daughter, Alana, cut a sprig of lavender alongside her friend Elzy McCoy during a play date at Twin Creeks Lavender Farm.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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Morgan Moon, left, holds her daughter Emilia while she talks with her mother-in-law, Rae Brooks, as her husband, Graeme, picks lavender in the background. “They said they have lavender ice cream, and you had me at ice cream,” Graeme says.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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Teams of mostly high school students do the tough but fun work of collecting lavender and pulling weeds in the fields. Much of the crop is used to scent candles, soaps and lotions that are sold alongside honey and dried bunches of lavender in the farm’s store.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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Twin Creeks sells more than 100 different lavender products at the farm, from lotions to honey.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
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The farm’s 2025 U-Pick season runs May 30–June 29, with an end-of-season celebration July 4. The farm is open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday through Sunday.
Photo by Matthew Franklin Carter
There are moments when Michelle Ducworth is on her tractor, mowing along the rows of lavender, and she spots a dragonfly dancing just off her shoulder. She thinks of her father and the path that’s led her here.
“It’s like, ‘Hey, Dad,’” Ducworth says, sitting in the shade of a barn at the end of another long day at her Twin Creeks Lavender Farm nestled in the rolling hills near Williamston. “He’s my wingman, working beside me.”
She tells of a day long ago when she and her dad were fishing at the pond nearby, and a dragonfly landed on his finger. He called her over, and she watched, spellbound, as the winged insect crawled from his hand to hers. It was a moment in time between a dad and daughter.
Years later, in 2015, her dad, Lyman “Butch” Ducworth Jr., went to lie down after dinner one night and never got up. He was 66, weary after countless 12-hour days as an emergency room doctor and his own battle with colon cancer.
Michelle Ducworth pauses and surveys the rows of lavender that sprout from the land that once served as a pasture for her father’s herd of beef cattle. At the time of her father’s death, she had a successful career in the medical field, and life seemed to be just fine.
“I never saw myself as a farmer. I was a surgical device rep. It was who I was,” she says. “And I loved it. And I made a difference. I made a big difference. … I miss it, but not enough to leave this.”
Her hand brushes back a loose strand of her brown hair, and her eyes look out over the hills and the 200 acres that four generations of Ducworths have farmed and called home.
“I’ve never caught a dragonfly since,” she says, “but I’ve always felt closest to Daddy when I’m here on the farm. It’s where I was raised. I felt a strong calling to put the farm back to work.”
Buck up, buttercup
The calls of mockingbirds and indigo buntings sing through the planted rows at Twin Creeks. There’s a constant hum of bees as they bounce from one blossom to another. A grandmother and a mother, both in wide-brimmed hats, bend to cut the purple spikes that shoot up from the woody stems and clumps of green.
A late spring breeze blows from the north, and dustings of lavender cling to fingertips and pantlegs. Grasshoppers, no bigger than a thumbnail, bounce on strands of black weed barrier, their sound like kernels popping over an open flame.
It’s hard to believe these 5 acres of hard-packed clay have, in less than a decade, transformed into a farm where seven varieties of lavender grow in thick clumps and people flock to gather cuttings for bouquets.
Ducworth originally dreamed of an organic herb garden with lavender, rosemary, thyme, lemongrass and basil.
“I had this vision where the best chefs from all over the Southeast would come to get the finest, freshest herbs. But then I got to look at all that you can do with lavender and how it promotes rest and peace and sleep and helps relieve people of anxiety,” she says. “I was like, ‘Wow, I’m really digging this herb.’”
There were doubters, of course.
Some people told her, “You can’t grow lavender here.” And she would think, “Don’t tell me I can’t do something.” Ducworth describes these conversations while a half-grin forms at the crook of her mouth. “Yeah, I’m pretty tenacious.”
With advice from Victor Gonzales, one of the nation’s top lavender growers, and the help of the Clemson agricultural extension office, Ducworth broke ground in 2017 and spread tons of lime and bone meal, working the soil again and again until it resembled sand more than clay. Then, she and her team hand-planted 7,500 seedlings and waited and waited.
Mice came and chewed the irrigation lines. Then, there were the weeds—that never-ending cycle of thistle and jimsonweed that threatened to overtake the young plants.
“That’s running a farm,” Ducworth says. “Not every day is going to be smooth and full of bliss. There are days when you’re praying for rain and days when you’re praying for the rain to stop. There were plenty of times when I thought, ‘Why is this happening to me? I worked so hard for this.’”
She stops, then nods her head. “Sometimes, God is just making you a stronger person and building you more character, and this is a test of how you’re supposed to handle things. In the end, you’d just better rise up and buck up, buttercup.”
So, Ducworth and her small team did what farmers do and worked and weeded and weeded some more, and, in 2019, the lavender had grown to where it was ready for its first harvest. And it was then when Twin Creeks hosted its first U-Pick event.
A place of community
DeDe Brame, of Spartanburg, is an icon of farm fashion in a straw hat and scarf as she stands beside a row of the Grosso lavender variety. She seems unsure of what to do with the blunt-edged scissors in her hand.
“I’m a girl from Brooklyn, and this U-Pick is all new to me,” Brame says, pausing to swat at a wayward bee while calling out for her daughter, Geraldine Ahart, who soon appears with a big bundle of lavender in her hand. Ahart lives in Greenville and is a special education teacher in Spartanburg schools. She had suggested they visit the lavender farm.
The pair like to cook and were going to try some lavender recipes, while Ahart had plans to make her own lavender spray. She says she enjoys taking outings with her mother.
“We do the Thelma-and-Louise-type thing,” Ahart says. “We get the hats, we go to the vineyards …”
Her mother taps her on the arm.
“You’re not supposed to divulge everything,” Brame says, and their shared laughter fills the field.
Nearby, Graeme Moon is cutting stems of Royal Velvet while his mother, Rae Brooks, of Walhalla, stands nearby with his children Emma and Logan and his in-laws. His wife, Morgan, is holding their newborn, Emilia, against her chest. The Moons live in nearby Anderson, and this is their first visit to the farm.
“They said they have lavender ice cream, and you had me at ice cream,” Graeme says.
The Moons have bees similar to those in the hives adjacent to Twin Creeks, and they would love to add chickens, Morgan says. She grew up in the suburbs of Columbia but has embraced the country way of life.
“We got married, and he turned me into a country girl,” she says. “I’m going to try to make lavender syrup. And maybe use it with my sourdough.”
The lavender-pollinated honey and lavender ice cream, as well as elderberry lavender lemonade, are popular with customers and products of partnerships Twin Creeks has formed with other area businesses.
“I think it’s really special when two small businesses can come together and collaborate and create a final product you can’t get anywhere else,” Ducworth says.
Since opening in 2019, Ducworth has slowly built her brand, making her own products and using the essential lavender oils harvested from her field. Her core products are lavender soaps, body butters and lotions. Altogether, there are more than 100 different Twin Creeks items.
The farm has hosted weddings, and Ducworth hopes to expand into corporate retreats. They’ve started replanting some of the smaller lavender varieties and have plans to expand to another field where they’ll harvest lavender by machine while keeping the popular U-Pick events. Their sunset picnic and end-of-season Fourth of July celebration see large crowds.
“It’s fun that people use this farm to gather. It’s a place of peace,” Ducworth says. “It’s kind of a family here, and I like it that way.”
Betsy Bain of Greenville has worked at Twin Creeks for the past five years. She’s the field team leader and responsible for maintaining the fields and heading up the harvest. It’s her job to show her work crews, made up mostly of area high school students, how to hang and dry the lavender in the barn and how to dig deep to remove the taproot of the weed.
Work can be brutal in the fields in the peak of summer, but it’s where Bain likes to be.
“I love manual labor. I don’t thrive behind a desk,” she says. “Being outside, nature all around—that’s my happy place.”
Bain has worked at plenty of organic farms, but Twin Creeks holds a special place in her heart. “I love people being in their element, doing their thing, the sense of community that is out here,” she says.
Where lavender and memories grow
Some say a dragonfly symbolizes a rebirth and represents change in one’s life. Others say it brings good luck, financial gain and even happiness. And while the bees are dominant at Twin Creeks, the dragonflies are also present among the lavender. Often, they appear when least expected, hovering just off your shoulder.
“I’ve loved every era in my life,” Ducworth says. “It was tough when Daddy died, but this blossomed from it. Now, if God said, ‘I’ll give you your daddy back, but you have to give up the farm,’ I’d give up the farm, obviously.
“But still, I have a much better quality of life. My schedule is no longer revolving around my 90-something surgeons I used to have to keep up with. And there’s something to be said for that.”
Her cellphone rings, and her mom, Barbara, is asking how much longer she’ll be. Mom’s over in the family homestead that dates back to 1892, less than a five-minute walk away. It’s where Ducworth distills the oil from the lavender. It’s also where she and her younger brother, Scott, grew up.
There’s a shuffle of feet at the barn door, and a man enters—he’s a neighbor who saw the bees, and he’s looking for the lavender honey he’s heard so much about.
These experiences—the smiles, the people, the memories—even out the long, hard, hot days in the field. Creating memories of a lifetime is something great, Ducworth says.
“Maybe a child grows up and says, ‘Mom, remember when we went to this lavender farm and we had the best ice cream and it was one of my favorite times?’ I want to be a part of that.”
Get There
Twin Creeks Lavender Farm’s 2025 U-Pick season runs May 30–June 29, with an end-of-season celebration July 4. The farm is open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Thursday through Sunday. It is free to visit; just pay for the lavender you pick in $5, $10 and $15 bundles. Only cellphone photography is allowed during U-Pick hours.
The farm is located at 4638 Midway Road in Williamston.
For more information, visit http://www.twincreekslavender.com.