Heavenly Herbs 4-page gardening special

I’ve grown herbs for many years. For twenty-three of those years I ran a famous walled herb garden on Hadrian’s Wall. We grew culinary and medicinal plants, varieties for dying cloth, aromatic plants and edible flowers. I continue to grow this fascinating range of useful plants and still enjoy trying out new varieties or combining them in new ways in my garden.

One of the questions

I’ve most often been asked is about pruning woody herbs, especially lavender. I’d always give the standard answer; cut back after flowering but don’t cut into the old wood. Just clip the bushes a short way into this year’s growth. This is what many experts including the RHS advise. By pruning this way from the first year, the shrub only grows a small amount year on year and avoids it becoming straggly. Or so I thought...

This spring we laid new gravel on a part of the garden where lavender ‘Hidcote’ had seeded itself. Because we had so many lavender plants, including several years old, I wasn’t bothered if I lost some by pruning them back very hard in order to lay the gravel. They grew back with renewed vigour and flowered fantastically. There was even one lavender growing in the wrong place that I actually wanted to kill. To save the trouble of digging it out I cut the thick wood to ground level - and up it popped again!

Please don’t blame me if you do the same in spring and your lavender plants don’t survive. But it just shows how you can often challenge traditional thoughts on gardening.

For other woody herbs, I clip thyme back after flowering and I prune sages and wall germander hard back in spring. And curry plant and cotton lavender can be clipped several times in the season to keep them as silver mounds.