The Big Lavender Chop

The Lavender path along the greenhouse has had a seriously big chop this year. I’m not sure how this story is going to end, and I guess I won’t know fully until next year!

To keep your lavender looking good for as long as possible, it’s really important to trim it every year. It needs to be done as soon as the flowers have gone over, this is usually early September.

It’s also important to not trim it too late in the year. It needs time to put on new growth and for this soft new growth to harden up, giving it protection through the winter.

The most important rule of all though, is to never cut it back into the old wood, but some rules just need to be broken…

I’ve grown lavender as long as I’ve been gardening. The gardening apprentice and I both adore the scent and the bees absolutely love it!

The first lavender I ever bought was ‘Munstead’. I bought it for it’s darker purple colour, only later learning that it had one of the most compact habits. We planted it each side of some steps in our first garden.

I used to love sitting on those steps on a warm summers day, as the tiles had heated up in the sun. The lavender would be simply covered in busy bees and despite my very close presence, they weren’t remotely interested in me. I could watch them so closely, bobbing from one tiny flower to the next, and the scent was an added bonus!

Although ‘Munstead’ was a so called compact variety and despite trimming it to a tight ball each year, it still got too big and the gap to walk through got smaller each summer.

One summer the gardening apprentice took it into his head to hack the lavender right back into the old wood, an absolute no no in gardening practice. His thoughts were that it had got far too big so it was worth a go, worst case scenario we’d have to replace it.

My comments can’t be repeated on here, but to my amazement it grew back, not just weakly but really strongly!

Choosing the correct lavender variety!

If we thought that ‘Munstead’ got to big though, we were about to find out quite how big some varieties got!

We had a small front garden and I wanted to plant it as a little knot garden. Obviously box or yew would be the ideal choice but they were expensive. Around this time I saw a good deal on lavender plug plants, they were supposed to be ‘Hidcote’ another dark purple, compact variety. They were not!

Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of what resulted, but what I can tell you, is that the lavender grew to around three to four foot, or 90-100cm.

It got so big that rather than a lovely lavender pathway up to the front door, it actually grew right across the path. This resulted in the poor postman eventually refusing to come through it, as he was scared of the buzzing swarm of bees that were as happy as could, ‘bee’!

Another chop back was in order!

We did eventually replace the lavender with box, which behaved itself beautifully and created a lovely lot garden.

Lavender for the new garden

High on the list of ‘must have’ plants when we moved to this garden was lavender, but we weren’t going to get stung again! Sorry couldn’t resist that.

To make absolutely sure that we got the variety of lavender that we ordered, we went to the specialists Norfolk Lavender. We chose a compact variety called ‘Lavenite Petit’ and we have been very happy with it.

We wanted to plant a lavender pathway down the side of the greenhouse, not just to look and smell wonderful but to attract the gardeners best friend, the bees.

As there is a louver window by the path, we knew the bees would find it irresistible to come in and pollinate the tomatoes, gherkins and chillies.

As well as the lavender pathway, we under planted the olive tree in the Mediterranean bed with four plants. The solar spotlight highlights the lavender after dark.

The Big Trim

Last year for the first time ever, we did not get around to trimming the lavender down the path.

The flowers just went on and on and as a result there were still bees feeding on it, I just didn’t have the heart to chop it back whilst they were still busy. It got later and later and we’d missed the opportunity.

It has looked really good this year, but even this very compact variety has got bigger than I wanted, with the lack of last yeas trimming compounding the problem.

The only good thing about this years heatwave, is it has made the lavender flowers go over much earlier than normal. This meant that it was ready to be cut by the end of August, which would allow plenty of time for rejuvenation, hopefully!

I closed my eyes and let the gardening apprentice loose!