It’s funny how our pasts catch up with us. I grew up in a house that looked out on to the main thoroughfare of the village. From the kitchen you could see people doing the school run or popping to see a friend. Between the window and the pavement was a small flower bed, the size of the kitchen table, which my mum filled with lavender. In high summer it hummed with bees and was ruffled by the hands of passersby trying to catch a whiff.
This might have been what was going on when, last April, I bought a tray of lavender plants from east London’s Columbia Road market after lunch at a friend’s and plonked them, slightly heady with red wine, into the gravel of our front yard. A year and a season later and they have filled out tremendously: big long spires, pale purple drumsticks, a delirious number of bees.
In the wrong circumstances, lavender can be tricky. It hates having wet feet, and will protest with limp, floppy little flower stems and even mouldy leaves if planted in soil too claggy or wet. Not enough sunshine or space and it’ll fail to grow well. But get it in the right place and it will romp away. A nice open site with lots of sunshine and free-draining soil and it’ll thrive with almost zero intervention; these are exactly the conditions of my largely abandoned front yard. They’re also drought-tolerant: I don’t think I even watered them in when I planted them – it had been an indulgent afternoon.
Picking the right variety is important, too. It’s easy to get lured in by the fat, darker flowers and bunny-eared bracts of French lavender, or Lavandula stoechas, but the more minimalist English lavender (‘Hidcote’ is a go-to) is better at putting up with cold snaps and luring in bees. I enjoy a white lavender, too – ‘Ballerina’ has a lengthy flowering period and bracts as pretty and ruffled as lingerie.
The flowers are something else but think about foliage, too – it’ll be around for more of the year and offers lovely tussocks of form and colour. Soft grey foliage can offer a good base for other, brightly flowering plants (‘Sussex’, ‘Sawyers’ and the crinkly leaved L dentata var. denata ‘Royal Crown’) while ‘Willow Vale’ has greener leaves that will slide in with other foliage.
Now is the time to prune: once the plants have stopped flowering and before they’ve turned brown. Don’t be afraid to go quite hard – using nice sharp scissors or secateurs up to, but not into, the tougher woodier parts, leaving a little bit of new growth on the stem. Aim to create a neat mound.
As for the flowers? Bring them indoors, tie them into bunches and hang them, upside down, from whatever you can. They’ll dry out, offering the smell of summer for weeks to come.
