Flax grown for linen is not cut. It is pulled. At harvest, the whole plant is drawn out of the soil with its roots, so that the fibre inside the stem is kept at its full length, from the base to the top. That one fact answers most of the question of how flax is harvested, and it explains a great deal about why good linen feels the way it does.

The fibres that become linen run the length of the stem, just under the bark, in bundles held together by natural pectins. In fibre flax, the plant has been bred over centuries to grow tall and straight, around a metre high, with few branches. The longer the fibre, the finer and stronger the yarn that can be spun from it. Cutting the stem above the ground, as with a cereal, would lose the part of the fibre that extends towards the root, and leave a shorter, weaker strand.

The growing season is short. In the flax belt of Western Europe, which runs along the Channel coast from Normandy through Belgium to the Netherlands, flax is sown in March or April in cool, damp soil. It grows quickly, around a hundred days from sowing to harvest. In June, the fields flower: each plant opens small pale-blue flowers that last a single day, and for a week or two whole fields turn blue in the morning. After flowering, the seed capsules form, the stems begin to yellow from the base, and in July the crop is ready.

Timing matters. Pulled too early, the fibre is fine but weak; pulled too late, it becomes coarse and harder to separate. Growers watch the colour of the stem and the state of the seed capsules to choose the moment, and the weather of that summer decides much of the quality of the year's linen.

Flax was once pulled by hand, a slow and heavy labour that occupied whole villages for weeks. Today, specialised pulling machines grip the stems between belts and draw them up from the soil without breaking them. The machines then lay the plants on the ground in long, even rows called swaths, with all the stems pointing the same way. A harvested flax field looks combed, striped in pale gold.

Those rows are where the next stage begins. The plants are left lying on the field for several weeks, and the dew, rain and sun, together with the bacteria and fungi in the soil, slowly break down the pectins that bind the fibre to the woody core of the stem. This is dew retting. Partway through, the swaths are turned over by machine, so both sides ret evenly. When the stems have turned from gold to grey-brown, they are rolled into bales and taken in.

From the bale, the flax goes to the mill, where the woody parts are broken and beaten away to free the long fibre, a process called scutching. Hackling, which combs the fibre into fine parallel strands ready for spinning, follows.

The pulled harvest also explains a little of linen's reputation for being natural. Flax needs little irrigation in the cool, rainy climate of the flax belt, the retting is done by the field itself, and every part of the plant has a use: the fibre for cloth, the shorter tow for coarser yarns and other products, the seeds for oil and food, and the woody shives for board and bedding.

The Belgian Linen® certification that Pieter Petros works with follows the flax from the field where it is grown and pulled to the finished cloth; the men's collection and the women's collection are made from it by hand, in Dubai and in Belgium.

A flax field in July, after pulling, is quiet and nearly flat; the only sign of the crop is the long rows on the ground, drying in the summer wind before the dew begins its work.

Read more: How Linen Is Made, from the Flax Field  ·  The 100% Belgian Linen Guide