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If your lavender has finished blooming and is starting to look woody or messy, now is the time to prune it. A quick trim after flowering helps keep plants compact, encourages healthy new growth, and can lead to better blooms next year—but cutting in the wrong place can permanently damage the shrub.
How to Prune Lavender
According to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences, timing is important when pruning lavender. Keep your plants looking neat and stimulate new growth and more blooms by giving them a trim in mid- to late-summer, after the flowers are gone. Depending on the size of your lavender, you will want to remove one-third to one-half of the plant.
In colder climates, finish pruning by late summer so plants have time to harden off before winter. In warmer regions, a light shaping after flowering is usually sufficient.
Don’t Make These Mistakes
Lavender doesn’t grow on old wood, so don’t cut the leafless, woody stalks. You want to cut above new leaf growth on the soft, flexible stems. If you cut into the woody stems, you risk leaving permanent gaps in the shrub.
Also, healthy lavender should never be cut all the way to the ground. Unlike many perennials, lavender is a woody shrub, and severe pruning can kill it.
Remove Faded Flowers
In addition to pruning, you can also deadhead individual flowers once they have wilted, which can promote a small flush of new blooms in certain varieties. This makes more sense if you are growing smaller amounts of lavender in containers or window boxes rather than a larger shrub in the yard.
Common Lavender Varieties
There’s nothing quite like the fresh, clean scent of lavender in bloom. The shrub’s delicate purple blooms and silvery-green leaves make a lovely addition to your garden or containers and don’t require a lot of care to thrive. Plus, if you want to enjoy it indoors, lavender makes wonderful fresh and dried arrangements and has lots of other uses in the home, too.
There are four common varieties of lavender:
- Spanish—pineapple-shaped flowers on leafy light-green spikes
- French—small purple flowers and silvery serrated leaves
- English—small, violet-colored blooms on tall spikes
- Lavandin—a hybrid variety with strongly scented dark purple flowers
A few minutes spent pruning lavender each summer can keep plants fuller, healthier, and covered with fragrant blooms year after year. Just remember the golden rule: Always leave green growth on every stem and never cut into bare wood.
