Farm Tomita

Tomita has grown lavender in Nakafurano since 1958, originally for the perfume oil trade. In the 1970s that trade collapsed, undercut by synthetic fragrance from abroad, and every other lavender grower in Hokkaido ploughed their fields under. Tomita kept one hillside, mostly out of stubbornness. In 1976 a national railway calendar ran a photograph of it, people started arriving to look, and the farm found a second business by accident.

It now takes around a million visitors a year and entry is still free, as is the parking, which is unusual enough to mention. The flowers peak in the first three weeks of July, and that is when the fields do what the photographs show: rows of purple running downhill with the Tokachi mountains behind them.

There is more than lavender. Saika no Hatake is a field planted in horizontal bands of poppies, salvia and other flowers, so it reads as a rainbow from the road, and it holds colour through August after the lavender is cut. Greenhouses keep some lavender in bloom outside the season.

Eat the lavender soft serve, which tastes more floral than it sounds, and the Furano melon in season.

Two practical points. Come before nine in the morning; the tour coaches arrive mid-morning and the paths between the rows become one-way traffic. And in July, JR opens a temporary halt called Lavender Field station on the Furano line, a seven-minute walk from the gate, which saves the parking queue entirely.