Climate Watch

When the Mediterranean Gets Hot, We Feel It Too

When we think about lavender fields in France or olive groves stretching across Italy, Spain, and Greece, it's easy to picture beautiful landscapes bathed in warm Mediterranean sunshine. That sunshine is certainly part of what helps create many of the essential oils and vegetable oils we use every day, but those remarkable plants also depend on something far less glamorous: the right balance of rainfall, healthy soil, seasonal temperatures, and enough water to complete another growing season.

When that balance changes, the effects don't stay in the Mediterranean.

Eventually, they reach all of us.

At Casaroma, many of the ingredients we use begin with a farmer standing in a field, hoping this year's harvest will be a good one. Lavender, rosemary, thyme, cistus, and many other aromatic plants all depend on the weather working with them rather than against them. The same is true for the olives that become olive oil, the almonds that produce sweet almond oil, and many of the other plants that provide the carrier oils we use in our creams, lotions, massage oils, and skincare products.

Sometimes we forget just how much nature contributes before a single bottle ever reaches our shelves.

Take olive oil as an example.

It generally takes between 8 and 12 kilograms (18–26 pounds) of olives to produce one litre of extra virgin olive oil, depending on the variety of olive, growing conditions, and the amount of oil each harvest produces.

If your family uses one litre of olive oil each month, that's about 12 litres every year.

To produce that amount may require roughly 100 to 145 kilograms of olives—well over 220 to 320 pounds of fruit. That is just one family—now, think about it on a larger scale. That is a lot of olives!

Suddenly, one bottle of olive oil tells a very different story.

The same is true for essential oils.

Lavender is wonderfully generous compared with many aromatic plants, yet it still takes a surprising amount of plant material to produce a small bottle of essential oil. Depending on the variety and growing conditions, around 100 to 150 kilograms of flowering lavender may be needed to produce one kilogram of essential oil. Since one kilogram of lavender essential oil is roughly equivalent to one litre, every 10 mL bottle represents the harvest of a remarkable amount of fragrant blossoms.

Some essential oils require even more plant material. Rose is famous for requiring thousands of kilograms of petals to produce a single kilogram of oil, reminding us that these precious botanicals are truly concentrated gifts from nature.

This is why changing weather patterns matter.

Increasing heat, prolonged drought and water shortages across parts of the Mediterranean can reduce harvests, affect the health of the plants and sometimes increase the cost of producing these remarkable ingredients. A difficult growing season doesn't automatically mean shortages, but it can influence availability and pricing months later, long after the weather has changed.

At the time of writing, we haven't seen confirmed reports showing exactly how the 2026 growing season will affect essential oil yields, so there is no reason for alarm.

We simply believe it's worth paying attention, because every little bottle on our shelves has a story that began long before it arrived at Casaroma.

It began with healthy soil, it continued with sunshine and rain, and it depended on the care of skilled farmers and distillers. 

And it reminds us that every time we choose a natural product, we are connected to people and landscapes on the other side of the world that make those remarkable gifts possible.

 This Week's Plant - Olive Tree

· An average mature, healthy olive tree yields between 33 and 100 pounds (15 to 45 kg) of olives per year.

It takes approximately 8–12 kg of olives to produce 1 litre of olive oil.

· A family using 1 litre each month may enjoy the harvest of well over 100 kg of olives every year. 

· Olive trees can live for hundreds of years, and some productive trees are believed to be more than 1,000 years old.