Lavender's name traces to the Latin lavare, to wash, and that plain, domestic origin, scenting bathwater and laundry rather than an altar, sits oddly beside its place in a modern incense correspondence table. Two specific historical uses show the herb moving from housework into rite, rather than starting there.
European folk Christianity used dried lavender as a strewing herb, scattered on church floors before a service the way rushes and other fragrant plants were strewn in ordinary homes, so that a building smelled cared for on the same principle as a swept house rather than through any incense burned specifically for the purpose. A protective bunch of lavender hung at the door at midsummer extended the same washtub-adjacent logic, freshness read as a kind of protection, into a seasonal custom.
Greco-Roman antiquity got there first in a narrower sense: lavender scented the bath before it scented worship at all, a use recorded well before any ceremonial role is attested for the plant, which makes lavender unusual among the incenses here for having a documented secular use that clearly predates its ritual one rather than the reverse.
Provence's lavender fields, now as much a tourist landmark as a working crop, are the descendants of exactly this domestic, cash-crop history rather than of any older sacred grove, a detail easy to miss once the plant is sold as incense in a shop that frames every ingredient as mystical.