How to trim lavender – maintenance and hard pruning

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Trimming lavender is an important step that helps extend and renew blooming year after year.

Although the plant will grow fine if it isn’t pruned, your lavender will never be more beautiful than if you care for it regularly.

Maintenance pruning on lavender also keeps it from seeming bare or sparse.

Read also:

• All there is to know about lavender
• Health benefits of lavender

Trimming lavender

To help lavender keeps its figure, the best technique is to prune on a regular basis. Pruning lavender every year will enhance blooming.

When to prune lavender

• The right time to prune lavender is after the blooming, at the end of summer.
• Keeping up with this repeated pruning will result in magnificent plants.
• Start pruning your lavender as soon as you have it, very young.
• Pruning yearly from the very start will make sure the shape stays beautiful as it grows old.

Don’t hesitate to occasionally prune during the blooming if you wish to harvest lavender flowers.

• For example, you can craft lavender wands that will last up to four years!
• You may also use flowers that are still open and place them in a closet in a pouch, pot-pourri or bowl. This will give the laundry a nice smell.

Maintenance pruning of lavender

After blooming, remove wilted flowers and preserve the shape of the lavender shrub with the following steps:

• Lavender is only pruned on tender wood, ideally on the year’s growth.
• Old growth never sends new shoots out (curious why?). If lavender is pruned on old growth, it can’t grow back, and there is a chance it would die.
• Best practices are to snip all around the lavender plant, without ever cutting old, dry wood.
• A good way to do this is to cut on the current year’s leaves.

A video on trimming lavender

Here is a video on how to correctly prune your own lavender.

Other types of pruning for lavender

You might have read that lavender can’t take a hard pruning. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the only solution for an old lavender is to pull it out!

• There are several ways to rejuvenate old, woody lavender.

These include the two following techniques:

• hard pruning lavender over several years, in portions
• layering lavender