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
- Monty Don said lavender colours a mood of gentle refinement and prettiness
- He said it is long-lasting, ideal for a pot and resistant to almost total neglect
- Lavender hates sitting dormant in cold water and needs regular watering
Monty revisits one of his classic books in an occasional series Gardening at Longmeadow with Monty Don.
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.
It is curious how this most Mediterranean of plants has become so English, so 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.
Few plants evoke so many things so powerfully as lavender. It defines a colour (even though it comes in lots of shades). Pictured: Lavender fields in England
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, well-drained site.
Lavender hates sitting dormant in cold water, but it does need regular watering in summer if grown in pots.
Lavender is long-lasting, ideal for a pot and resistant to almost total neglect. Lavender hates sitting dormant in cold water, but it does need regular watering in summer if grown in pots
YOUR KITCHEN GARDEN: ARTICHOKES
Artichokes are one of the few vegetables that are truly worth their place in a border as well as producing delicious food.
They are easy to grow and a couple of plants will provide a number of summer meals.
They do best in full sun and rich soil but need good drainage.
Artichokes are one of the few vegetables that are truly worth their place in a border as well as producing delicious food
A generous addition of compost in the planting hole deals with this.
Remove any flower stems in the first year, allowing all the growing energy to go into the roots and leaves.
In the second year they should grow with more vigour and produce at least two cuttings.
They are perennials, but after their third year of maturity (fourth year from seed) productivity goes down and they are best ditched.
If you take offsets from the second year on, you will have a constant supply of second and third year plants – which will produce the best harvest. Simply chop off a piece of root in spring, with a sliver of leaf attached from the parent, and plant where it is to grow. Do not worry when the leaf shrivels and dies, new ones take its place.
I have ‘Violetto di Chioggia’ growing, which has plum-coloured chokes, as well as ‘Green Globe’ (both pictured above), which produces a large round choke with flat, smooth overlapping plates.
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, faster-growing ‘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.
HOW TO MAINTAIN ROSES
■ Dead-heading keeps flowering going as long as possible. But leave a final flush of flowers in July to let hips form, as they look good and give birds food in autumn.
■ Any pruning is now best left until late summer, when you can remove any dead or diseased wood, or cut back any very long shoots or any branches that are rubbing or overcrowded.
Dead-heading keeps flowering going as long as possible. But leave a final flush of flowers in July to let hips form, as they look good and give birds food in autumn
■ To keep the fungal disease black spot at bay, prune in the new year so each plant has good ventilation, don’t crowd the roses with too many leafy herbaceous plants, and collect and burn all fallen leaves so the fungus doesn’t linger in the soil.
■ Powdery mildew is a grey mould on shoots and leaves, and is worsened by the base of the plant being too dry. This can happen even in a wet summer if the rain is light.
Extracted from Gardening At Longmeadow by Monty Don, BBC Books, £26. © Monty Don 2012.