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LAVENDER PRUNING 101

dogwoodhillslav

Updated: Oct 7, 2024

Pruning your lavender plants is an important part of growing lavender. Lavender plants are constantly growing. Proper care and management are needed to ensure that your plants stay healthy and live for years to come. If you do not prune your plants they will grow so large that the base of the plant will not be able to support the top of the plant, and it will "fall open" exposing the inside of the plant. If this happens your plant will continue to produce flowers but, you won't be able to get it back to the compact rounded scrub that it once was.


Lavender plants are typically pruned in either the spring before the plant starts to produce flower buds or in the fall after you are done harvesting your flowers. Here at the farm I harvest and prune my plants at the same time (I do this simply as a time management practice) and I have had good luck with that process. I will prune some of my plants in the fall when I start setting my cuttings for new lavender plants, but my main pruning is in the spring when I harvest my flowers. This set up works for me, but prune when it is the easiest for you.


Let's first look at the parts of your lavender plant, so that you will know where you can and shouldn't cut when pruning (or even harvesting) your lavender. There are three main parts of lavender plants that we are going to pay attention to for now. They are the woody (or base) part of the stem, the semi-wood part and the green part.


The woody section of the stem could also be called the base of the stem. This is the "trunk" of the plant, and its appearance looks just like the trunk of a tree (like bark). This is the one section of the plant that you need be careful to NOT cut into a lot. Some times you must cut into this section (i.e. you have a branch that has grown excessively taller then the rest and you need to trim it back to match the rest of the plant), but when you do try to cut into this area as little as possible. Cutting into this area will damage the plant and if done too much it will kill your plant.



Moving up the stem we come to the semi-wood section. This area is the transition from base of the stem to the growing green section of the stem. This is the area that must be maintained in order to keep the plant from growing too large. When I prune this is the area that I cut in. You can tell this area because the stem will be a mixture of brown and green. English lavenders will have a "bigger" section of semi-wood then the hybrid lavenders will. This allows you to cut back your English lavenders more than the hybrids.



The top of the stem is appropriately named the green section of the stem or the flower spike (this is the part that is held my my gloved hand in the above picture). This where the plant grows the beautiful flowers that we all know and love. Cutting in this area will not hurt the plant.


Now on to what you have been waiting for: how to prune! You will first need to decide what you are going to use to cut your plants. You can use a pair of scissors or snips if you don't have many plants to prune, or if you have a large number of plants you could even use a hedge trimmer to make the process much faster. Here on the farm I use my harvesting knife to do my pruning. Use what ever you have on hand, going out and buying a specific tool is not necessary to prune your lavender.




In the above picture you can see that I make my cuts in the semi-wood part of the plant and in the image below you will see that when I make my cuts I grab a handful at a time and make one big cut.



The next two images are a before and after of the lavender variety French Perfume. You can see that the plant is about half the size after pruning than before. English lavender varieties can be pruned up to 1/2 its original size and it won't hurt the plant. Hybrid lavender varieties can't handle that hard of a pruning, you will need to prune those down by 1/3 of their original size. Due to the rate that a hybrid lavender can grow you may have to do two pruning's on them, once in the spring and once in the fall, to help maintain their shape and to keep them from getting too big.


Before pruning:


After pruning


After you have pruned all of your lavender you can either compost your clippings or start your own cuttings to grow more lavender plants. I'll have a post on that at a later time. Happy Pruning!



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