As we enter into the last of the summer months, gardeners shouldn’t be slacking on their tasks to keep their plants happy and healthy for the rest of the year. Gardening expert Michael, more popularly known as the Mediterranean Gardener on TikTok, shared a helpful list of jobs every gardener should be doing in August.
One point centred around lavender, which is coming to the end of its flowering season. As lavender flowers in late spring and throughout the summer, if they’re not looked after properly, they can become woody, so it’s best to keep them compact. This is what Michael advised to do to lavender in August.
If you’re growing lavender in your garden, Michael explained that to keep the plant healthy and growing back time and again, you should be pruning. He said that it’s best to complete this task after flowering.
Flowering typically ends between August and September. To keep your lavender plants in check and give them a good chance of flowering year after year, you want to give them a ‘hard’ prune.
The Royal Horticultural Society advised removing any spent flower stalks and about 2.5cm (1in) of leaf growth. If you find that your plants are becoming untidy or have been damaged by frost over the winter, you can trim back the foliage in spring.
However, don’t cut too far down to the woody stems, as lavender does not break new growth easily from old stems. While giving your lavender a prune, Michael advised taking soft wood cuttings off the lavender, as well as other woody herbs, like rosemary.
If you don’t prune your lavender properly, you risk the plant going ‘leggy’. When a lavender plant is described as ‘leggy,’ it means it has developed long, sparse, and often woody stems with fewer leaves and flowers than a healthy, properly pruned plant.
Garden designer Ish explained in a TikTok video: “So at the end of summer, you give it something known as a summer prune, where you take the big bunches of it off and cut a really good third of it right down.
“By stunting that growth, it’ll develop a thicker side shoot, get nice and bushy, but not tall and leggy, keeping it nice and happy, and no woody bits.”