Alan Titchmarsh is full of gardening knowledge to get the best out of your plants – and this is no different when it comes to lavender.
Speaking previously to Express.co.uk, Alan claimed that the one plant gardeners shouldn’t be without this summer is lavender.
He noted that they’re highly versatile as you can grow them as neat edgings along a path, round flower beds, or team them with perennials near the front of a border.
The gardening pro claimed that lavender “looks fabulous” with alliums, especially the large, purple, drumstick sort that are at their best now.
Lavenders don’t just look and smell good, they are useful, too. You can cut the flowers for a vase indoors, dry them and rub off the individual florets to use as potpourri.
While lavender plants are “easy to grow”, they “need the right growing conditions” and care urged Alan.
One particular task owners need to carry out is pruning. He said: “Lavenders aren’t difficult plants to look after, but you must prune them.
“An unkempt lavender soon turns from a neat, busy youngster into a straggly geriatric with bare, arthritic woody stems, stunted bunches of foliage and very few flowers.”
The gardener explained that pruning acts as an “annual rejuvenation treatment” that “prolongs life to keep lavender looming, besides keeping them in shape for better blooms”.
But gardeners need to go about it in different ways for different kinds of lavender and know when to prune lavender.
The ideal time to prune lavender is late summer or early autumn when the flower stops producing flowers.
However, it’s possible to cut at other times of the year if absolutely necessary.
Alan claimed that the traditional English type of lavender and its hybrids, which have long spikes of flowers in June and July, want a light, all-over clipping as soon as the flowers are over – avoid cutting back into old wood if you possibly can.
Lavandula stoechas cultivars start flowering in May, and these only want regular deadheading – removing each of the big dead flowers complete with a short stalk as soon as they go over but leaving the rest of the plant untouched.
That way, “they’ll keep flowering in dribs and drabs throughout the summer” and on into early autumn.
Lavender plants don’t cope well with a hard prune. As a general rule of thumb, cut back around one-third to half of the plant’s existing size. Never cut more than two-thirds back of the plant will struggle to bounce back.
