I'm not sure if this is the right forum. Lavender is a herb, but the one in my garden is a huge bush, about 6 feet round and three feet high at its highest point. It seems to be doing all right on its own. I haven't touched it since we bought the place over 2 years ago. The house was rented for several years and I'm guessing no tenant put this plant in. The last owner occupant of our house, who was a magnificent gardener, left 8 years ago, so I can safely this lavender bush is at least that old. Today is the first time in about a month that I'm having a break between rain storms so I decided to go out and trim off some of the black that has died off. In doing so I see a lot of brown undergrowth on this plant. I did some random trimming for a few minutes until my gloves got too wet, but I really don't know how I should be trimming this bush. Its my guess that no matter what I do to it, it will come back as strong as ever next year. Any tips? I don't use the lavender for anything - I don't dry it or cut it to use in flower arrangements. It smells nice in the garden and its a pretty plant. That's it. Today is the first time in many years that someone has probably given it a little trim. I'm wondering how far back I should trim.
I don't know if this is the correct way to prune lavender Whistler but this is what I do. Once my plants have finished flowering I cut them back by around 1/3. I do this before there's a chance of any hard frosts and it's worked well for me since I got the lavender plants a few years ago. My plants come back each next year much bushier and produce a really good amount of flowers.
I'm not sure if MY way is right either, but here is what I do...I wait until spring and then I trim off any dead growth. After that, I cut back and shape the plant cutting off no more than 1/3 of the remaining growth. Works for me
I do mine like Eileen. I have found that one thing I MUST NOT do is prune back into the live, brown branches--it can kill that branch. Thus, I trim mine in the soft, green "new growth", well away from brown, woody part of the branch. I prune mine back 1/3 as well...but 1/3 of the new, green growth, not 1/3 of the total length. Another notw: I persona;;y feel that removing any dead branches could better be done in the late spring or early summer because with all the moisture that can come with wiunter, it is possible that too much moisture could enter the plant at the pruning site and rot could set in. Well, I know this may all sound a bit wimpy, but I had some bad experiences in the early days and disfigured some Lavender plants. It broke my heart. So, from then on I have been perhaps overly careful with trimming and pruning my Lavenders. Good luck to you.
Well, hopefully I haven't done too much damage to the plant! I started shaping it around the front, to give it a more round look, but after my gloves got too soggy I stopped. Therefore the sides of the lavender look oddball right now. A friend of ours is a gardener - does it for a living - and we have him come out sometime in December - January to prune our mature apple trees, so I'll have him look at the lavender then and see what he suggests, if I should keep trimming or leave it till spring. There is green growth on it, but that's the part I'd rather see keep growing. Its the black strands that are sticking out that I was trying to trim back, and yes, I got some of those brown undergrowth branches at the same time. I'd say I didn't even get close to trimming back a third of the plant.
