Hope Springs Eternal

A FAMILY’S FARM GIVES THEM COMFORT THROUGH DIFFICULT TIMES

HOPE RANCH SITS just over the crest of Pine Grove. e 22-acre farm belonging to the Roulette family is nestled between farmhouses with a double-mountain view. As you pull in and park in their make-shift lot alongside their crisp white lavender shop and climb from the car, you’re likely to feel the cortisol in your system dissipate. e murmur of industrious honeybees and the dusty- oral scent of lavender lls the air.

Up the sloped grass lawn sits the family’s sweet ranch house, which is the center of everything. North of the house are two large elds peppered with a dozen or so black and white cows, a large chicken coop, and a larger barn.

Ivy Roulette helps a customer at the family’s lavender stand, right, which also features fresh-cut flowers, including make-your-own bouquets. The stand is part of the Roulette’s Hope Ranch lavender farm in Pine Grove.

Adjacent to the lavender sprawls the family garden. Fruit trees, an over-zealous plot of strawberries, beds of leafy greens, eager tomatoes and root vegetables are in full force. e door to the kids’ playhouse is open, the greenhouse is bursting with baskets and starts. ere’s an old barn that holds, among other things, a blue 1952 Chevy pick-up truck that Mike brought home one day for Ivy as a gift. To know Mike and Ivy is to understand that the surprise delivery of a vintage truck is akin to a husband presenting his wife with a pair of diamond earrings. To know Mike and Ivy is to know what love looks like. e plants wintered over, but in spring 2020, as the Covid pandemic was settling over the world, the ground became saturated with rain. e wet spring ultimately contributed to the damage of over half of their fragile new plants.

Mike and Ivy’s farm is a physical manifestation of their love story. Prior to moving to Hood River, they lived on a thirty-foot sailboat in Long Beach, Calif. Mike worked as a re ghter and paramedic, Ivy as a high school art teacher. After a decade of living with 17 square feet of oor space and saving up, they came to the Gorge where Ivy had vacationed as a child, and they fell in love with the area.

“Nothing’s as beautiful as the Hood River Valley,” Ivy says. ey bought their property in 2009 and named it Hope Ranch, which is Ivy’s middle name (and her grandmother’s name).

Mike and Ivy are rst-generation farmers and they relied on the expertise and advice of others as they worked to turn their land into the functional farm it is now.

“Our neighbor and his wife took us in and they said, ‘You can’t maintain these elds without having animals on it. Come on, we’re going to go buy cows together!’” Ivy recalls with a laugh. First came the cows, then the kids: Grace, Ben and Olivia. Mike commuted to Portland for work, often gone for days at a time, while Ivy stayed home raising and educating the kids, and tending the farm.

“All that stu on the farm is her,” Mike says gesturing to Ivy. “She’s had three babies in the back seat and a sick calf in the front seat driving to the vet.” On his days o , they all worked together maintaining the farm, selling beef and a bit of hay, mostly to locals.

Having a lavender eld was always part of the dream. After nearly a decade, they nally began transforming the south swath of their property. ey invested in the plants and irrigation, prepped the land and got 10,000 plants into the ground in the summer of 2019.

On Mother’s Day, Ivy returned from the lavender eld dejected. “I said to Mike, ‘We’re losing all these plants.’ Hillsides of plants were just … dead. May and June were terrible.”

While losing the lavender was devastating for the Roulette family, things were about to get worse. As they tried to wrap their minds around the loss of the plants, Mike began experiencing tingling in his right arm.

“We were watching the plants die, die, die, and Mike’s arm started getting numb,” Ivy recalls.

On July 20, he had an MRI that revealed a large cancerous tumor in his brain. e next day, at home, Mike had a seizure, and he was transported by life- ight to OHSU in Portland. Two of the paramedics that came to get Mike, and Mike’s doctor, Nic Buser, happened to be good friends of the family. Nic’s wife, Heather, drove a rattled Ivy into Portland, and proceeded to let their friends know what was going on.

“I don’t know if this is just bragging on this amazing place,” Ivy says, “but we were crumbling, everything was coming to implosion, and it was an instantaneous rally.”

Mike had brain surgery on July 24, and the next day, while Mike and Ivy remained at the hospital, more than a hundred people gathered in their masks and work clothes under the hot summer sun to pull out thousands of diseased and dead lavender plants.

“I had started doing it myself and, emotionally, I couldn’t take it,” Ivy says. “Someone else needed rip it all out, and they did. We’re most lucky because of the community we’re in. People really leaned in.”

Mike and Ivy returned home to their farm and family, and Mike began his recovery and oral chemotherapy. e lavender eld was a clean slate. Due to Mike’s illness, he was unable to return to his high-demand job. ey turned their focus to the present: their kids, their love, their farm.

In the summer of 2021 they began distilling lavender oil and saving the hydrosol, a byproduct that they turned into a freshening spray. eir old barn wall was quickly covered in drying bundles of fragrant