The Accidental Lavender Farmer: Celebrating Marion Wiggins

Every field has its story, and every story has its farmer.

As the world marks the International Year of the Female Farmer, we wanted to take a moment to honor ours. The woman whose hands have planted more than 7,400 lavender shrubs across three Indiana fields. The mother who built a growing business while homeschooling her children. The former educator turned entrepreneur, restorer, and neighbor. The founder of Bloomfield Schoolhouse Lavender.

This is Marion's story.

From Arizona to LaGrange

Marion Wiggins never set out to be a lavender farmer.

Originally from Arizona, she studied in Boston, attended graduate school in St. Louis, and taught in San Antonio. She spent years working in deaf education, drawn to classrooms and to the quiet work of helping others learn. Farming was not on the map. Rural Indiana was not on the map.

Then in 2018, her husband Greg accepted a position as Chief Nurse Anesthetist at Parkview LaGrange Hospital, and the family relocated with a simple plan. Give it three years and reevaluate.

What they found instead was a home. A community woven around family, schools, libraries, parks, and the kind of everyday kindness that turns strangers into friends. LaGrange stopped feeling temporary. It started feeling like where they were meant to be.

The Accidental Lavender Farmer

When COVID arrived in 2020, the Wiggins family found themselves taking long drives around the countryside, looking for something to do together.

They kept passing an old brick schoolhouse.

"Every time we drove by, I said, if that ever comes on the market, I want to look at it," Marion has said. Sure enough, at the end of that year, it did. And they bought it, despite having no plan for what to do with it.

The 1904 Bloomfield Schoolhouse became their first act of historic preservation. As renovation slowly unfolded, Marion planted lavender out front. Just to see what would grow.

The plants thrived.

By the summer of 2023, the family had an abundant crop, and Marion took her children to the Howe Farmers Market with dried bunches, fresh cuttings, and handmade wreaths.

They sold out every week.

Building a Business, One Question at a Time

Customers began asking for more. Could they make soap? Lotion? Candles?

Marion went home and started learning. She researched, formulated, tested, and refined. What began as a summer side project turned into an entire winter of product development. By spring of 2024, Bloomfield had its first full lines of bath and body, culinary, and home products.

Today, Bloomfield produces more than 65 small-batch products, each one shaped by the community that inspired it. Marion still credits her customers for many of the best ideas.

"My customers have such great ideas," she says. "We started with our signature line, and we keep adding as people request things."

All while homeschooling her children. All while helping restore two historic buildings. All while quietly building one of the most recognized small brands in Northern Indiana.

Preservation as a Core Value

The Bloomfield story has always been rooted in restoration.

The 1904 schoolhouse is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of the only lavender farms in the country operating on a Register site. In July 2024, Marion and Greg purchased a second historic building at 107 W Spring Street in downtown LaGrange and reopened it as the Bloomfield Apothecary just four months later. And most recently, they purchased the former LaGrange Standard publishing building, with plans to bring that piece of downtown history back to life as well.

Three historic buildings. Three chapters in an ongoing love letter to LaGrange County.

Restoration, for Marion, is not a side project. It is a first principle. Every building the family purchases is preserved, restored, and reimagined with care for its original character and its future community use.

Recognition and Growth

The years since 2020 have brought a remarkable pace of recognition.

In 2025, Marion was named LaGrange County's Small Business of the Year by the LaGrange County Chamber of Commerce, a hometown honor that reflects the impact Bloomfield has had on downtown LaGrange and the surrounding community.

That same year, Bloomfield was featured in Entrepreneurship Indiana Magazine in the Early Category, a statewide recognition of the brand's rapid growth and community impact. The feature highlighted Bloomfield's expansion to more than 7,400 lavender shrubs, its wholesale network, and its receipt of a $250,000 USDA Value-Added Producer Grant.

Bloomfield has also been featured in the Chicago Tribune, on ABC57 News, in Visit Shipshewana's editorial coverage, and in numerous regional publications.

Today, Bloomfield products are stocked in more than twenty wholesale partners across coffee shops, bakeries, restaurants, spas, boutiques, and specialty stores throughout Indiana and beyond. Lavender drinks and desserts appear on local menus. Wholesale conversations continue every week.

A brand once made at a farmers market table is now on shelves across the Midwest.

Community Above Everything

Ask Marion what she is proudest of, and it is rarely a product or an award.

It is the relationships.

"The relationship building has been really my favorite part of the whole journey," she has said. Bloomfield's growth has never been solo work. It has been a collaboration with neighbors, with local makers, with the LaGrange County Chamber, with the Shipshewana Visitor Center, with the Indiana Small Business Development Center, and with every customer who ever walked into the Apothecary and asked if we had thought about making candles yet.

The Bloomfield Apothecary in downtown LaGrange is more than a shop. It is a make-your-own bath salts blending bar. It is a Lavender Laboratory where guests scent their own lotion. It is a place her children help ring up customers. It is one of those third spaces Marion believes so strongly in, the place beyond home and work where you can be yourself among friends.

What Marion Represents

The International Year of the Female Farmer is a moment to recognize the women who are quietly reshaping agriculture around the world. Women who are stewarding land, feeding communities, restoring history, and running businesses that outlast a single season.

Marion is one of them.

She has built a nationally recognized brand from a rural Indiana schoolhouse. She has proven that homeschooling and entrepreneurship can share the same kitchen table. She has shown that historic preservation, agricultural craft, and small-batch quality can not only coexist, they can thrive together.

And she has done it while making room for her family, her neighbors, and every visitor who wanders in and asks what a lavender farm is doing in the middle of Indiana.

Only the Beginning

The restoration of the Bloomfield Schoolhouse continues, with a projected completion in 2027. A larger off-site lavender field is being developed as a future u-pick destination. Plans are underway for the second floor of the Apothecary to become a small Lavender Bed and Breakfast, aiming to open later this year.

Wholesale partnerships continue to grow. Community classes and workshops continue to fill the calendar. The lavender continues to bloom, season after season.

What began as a temporary move to Northern Indiana has become one of the most quietly ambitious agricultural stories in LaGrange County.

And it started with a woman who saw an old schoolhouse from the road and thought it deserved another chance.

This year, and every year, we are grateful for Marion. And for every woman growing something meaningful, in Indiana and around the world.

With gratitude,
The Bloomfield Team