New lavender plants for a neat new lavender bed.

Ever since we moved into the dream garden, I’ve been thinking about the lavender bed. In fact, I was thinking about it before we’d even completed on the house purchase, which shows where my priorities lie. The reason I was thinking so much about it was less that I was excited about having a large bed full of lavender so close to the house and more that on the very first visit to the garden, when we bought the house, I could see it had been badly neglected.

Lavender is sold as a low-maintenance plant. You don’t need to water it or feed it that often. But one thing that people planting it really do need to know is that unless you prune it hard each year, your plant will grow woody and sprawling. In some contexts this can look really beautiful. But in a formal bed where lavender is the only plant, it looks miserable. The plants look good when they flower, but for the rest of the year the bed looks a mess. And because lavender does not regrow from its hard wood, if it isn’t pruned one year, it’s very difficult to rejuvenate it.

I hard-pruned the lavender that was there, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that this bed was never going to look any better. And so the sooner I overhauled it, the better.

So I dug the plants up, which I really hate doing. I hate removing living plants, but to make an omelette, you need to break eggs. So up they came.

Then Rosie the hen helped me clear the bed. It had a bit of couch grass snaking through it, so we’ve dug as much of those horrid roots from the grass as we can, to make it easier to maintain in future.

Then the fun bit. New lavender plants!

These are from Lavender World, which has a fabulous array of different lavenders. I chose to plant only one plant of each type, which will mean the lavenders flower at different times and in different colours

So, here are the different plants:

Lavandula x chaytoriae Sawyers
‘Sawyers’. The most silver-leaved lavender.
'Rosea'. Pink-flowered plant.
‘Rosea’. Pink-flowered plant.
‘Melissa Lilac’. Large, open lilac flowers.
‘Munstead’. Violet-blue flowers.
‘Loddon Blue’. Mid purple-blue flowers.
‘Hidcote’. Deep purple flowers.

There is also an ‘Arctic Snow’ white-flowered lavender snuck in there too.

These are small plants. But I’ve planted small lavender plants before and had very good results from them even in the first year. This is what my lavender in my first garden that I owned myself looked like in its first summer, and here it is in its second year.

To contrast with the lavender and provide colour and scent in winter, I’ve planted a Witch Hazel ‘Jelena’ at the very end of the bed nearest the steps. And in between the lavenders will go three ‘Midwinter Fire’ dogwoods, to continue the coloured bark repetition throughout the garden.

 

Along the front of the bed I will plant slightly more mature specimens of ‘Hidcote’, which is probably my favourite lavender, in a neat line, and that will mean that from this summer onwards I will have a lovely, neat, well-kempt lavender bed full of flowers and bees and scent.

Do have a look at Lavender World’s site. As well as plants, they sell culinary lavender, lavender oil and all sorts of lavender-y things. And their plants are very good quality.

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  2. » How the dream garden grows

    […] of the projects I am so, so glad that I undertook this year was renovating the lavender bed. It was also the project I was most uncomfortable doing, as it involved digging up a load of living […]

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