Purple CRAZE
There’s nothing lovelier than lavender, with its heady scent and vivid colour, says Monty Don – and there’s a type to suit every taste
FEW plants evoke so many things so powerfully as lavender. It defines a colour (even though it comes in lots of shades); it also colours a whole mood of gentle refinement and prettiness; and, above all, it produces a unique fragrance.
This most Mediterranean of plants is perfectly suited to accompany tea on the lawn.
The scent released by your fingers crumbling a few of the tiny flowers will trigger a chain of evocations. It is long-lasting, ideal for a pot and resistant to almost total neglect.
Lavender in gardens tends to be either a loose hedge or a single plant. The secret of keeping a lavender bush in good shape is to clip it hard immediately after flowering, but it’s important not to cut into the old wood. With this treatment it will hold a tight ball well and is a much cheaper and quicker-growing alternative to box if you have a sunny, welldrained site.
Lavender hates sitting dormant in cold water, but it does need regular watering in summer if grown in pots. Given the right conditions a bush can live for ages, developing branches like a blacksmith’s forearms.
THERE are many varieties of lavender to choose from. Lavandula angustifolia, common or English lavender, has the familiar mauve flower spikes and will grow to about 90cm high. There are white forms — L. angustifolia ‘Alba’, which does not grow quite so tall, and ‘Nana Alba’, which is small even when full-grown. L. a. ‘Rosea’ has pink flowers, as does L. a. ‘Jean Davis’. But to my mind pink lavender is like white chocolate — perfectly nice but an aberration.
The two most common varieties of L. angustifolia you’ll find in garden centres are ‘Munstead’ and ‘Hidcote’. The latter is a deeper mauve and a bit more vigorous than the paler, bluer, fastergrowing ‘Munstead’. Both make good hedging plants.
L. stoechas, French lavender, has mauve bracts on top of the flower spikes and narrow leaves that grow markedly up the stems. L. lanata makes a dome of soft woolly leaves, which then throws up long spikes twice as high again, topped with purple flowers.
I grow both of these in pots, bringing them inside in winter to protect them from the wet and cold. L. dentata has prettily crimped leaves and its flowers are also topped with bracts, though of a paler, blue colour. It’s not entirely hardy so needs protecting in a cold winter. L. latifolia is upright with broader leaves. It is crossed with L. angustifolia to make L. x intermedia, old English lavender; one variety of this, ‘Pale Pretender’, is perhaps the biggest lavender you can buy.
My granny would cut her lavender flowers on their long stems and dry them in the airing cupboard before putting the flowers in muslin bags to place in her clothes drawers. The best way to dry the flowers is to cut the stems just as the flowers open and place on trays or hang upside down in bunches.
To grow lavender from seed, sow in autumn, transplant the seedlings to bigger pots in spring and plant outside in early summer. Cuttings are best taken in late summer from new growth, and placed in well-drained compost. Put the rooted cuttings in a cold greenhouse or coldframe over winter and plant out the following spring.