Lavender

What lovely photos and how wonderful to think of lavender on such a cold winter's day!

Lovely Kat, I do like my lavender too, so useful. :-)

Thank you very much, Louisa and enjoy GoY as much as possible.
Slad@this is one of the most useful plants in the garden and does require only 15 minutes of care per year.

The Bees love it too !

Nice to read about the lavender :o)))

I love the smell of lavender and do have some in my wardrobes, another habit picked up from my mum....

In poor families of wine growers, which had just earthn floor in a dining room, they used to scatter dried lavender flowers on the floor. Thus the room smelled nice when people walked across it.

I love lavender - and my grandmother used to grow it. She made lovely sachets every year. The lavender would be spread out to dry on newspaper on the spare bedroom floor. The scent was wonderful. I remember one year, workmen came to lay a cable in her garden. She was out, and when she returned they had finished and left, having dug up the whole of her lavender hedge and left the plants uprooted in the sun. She was in tears and SO angry. I was only young. I understand now exactly how she must have felt. She lost a great many of her precious plants. I grow lavender in remembrance of her. I always have a big bunch in the front porch, which it perfumes all through the year. I think it is a very special plant.

Yes, that must have been infarction inducing situation. Poor grandma.

Yes. :-(

I had similar experience. Once a guy from Prague came to visit us in the evening, he was little bit tipsy and brought a bunch of roses to mother. In the morning we found, that he had cut our roses in the front garden.
;-)

I love the plant, we have grown it for many many years all sizes and all colours, a lot die on us every year, because of the wet, not so much the cold, and will continue to grow it in one form or another, thanks for the blog.....

Oh Katarina! That sounds like a scene from a silent film - I can just picture him staggering from bush to bush, picking the best ones. I wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry...

We were pleased and obliged to him that evening. Not the other day, lol.
I wonder, if there is something like "English lavender". When I was a teenager, I attended private lessons of English. My teacher was old lady, who had lived in Britain many years ago. She had received from friends in the UK lavender plants and she gave me one. It was extremely high, almost 1 m bush and it bloomed for almost two decades. Since that time I have never seen so big lavenders here.

You have reminded me to get some more plants.

Lavendula Angustifolia is probably the lavender you are thinking of, Katarina. It can grow quite large - I always cut mine back each year after flowering otherwise they get very leggy and twiggy. In the right place, though, they can last well. I have four in my herb bed and usually replace them every few years. Yours must have been an exceptional specimen to last so well. (Not that they don't last, they just lose their shape and end up very woody at the base and in the middle.)

Hi Melchi@majority of my lavenders are L. augustifolia. But they never reached size of that one, in spite they grow on a full sun.

It's strange how sometimes a particular specimen just takes off! I wonder if it's the unique position it's in, or a peculiar characteristic of the plant itself.

Yes, I do not know. The same experience I have with the rosemaries. Some grow like bush, some stay small. Like people ;-)