Instructions: Cut lavender in the garden and in the pot properly

• The complicated shrubs
• Instructions for the "safe" cut

Cutting lavender properly is not difficult, you just have to catch the right time, no matter if lavender in the garden or lavender in the pot. Cutting lavender can be difficult - as soon as you stop the cut for only one season, the article will tell you why.

Lavender in the garden and lavender in the pot are always pruned the same, this is not very complicated. The most important thing is to prune both from the beginning, and that regularly.

The complicated shrubs

The true lavender " Lavandula angustifolia " is a subshrub, a technically delicate intermediate between herbaceous plant and woody plant.

Shrubs lignify, but not really, only in a not exactly defined lower part. However, where they have managed to lignify, may never drive after a cut never again.

It is clear that a subshrubs lumber down, not fixed, which is "down". Shoots of the current season do not lignify, they are supposed to develop flowers and fruits. In true semi-shrubby these shoots are to die off at the end of the season, in the spring he should expel new. According to this explanation, no instincts would come to logging, purely logical, but it affects only mature plants. In general, shrubs develop shoots with very different genetic programs: First, a base (which is lignified and centimeters or meters high), then (fruit) shoots, which do not die in most shrubs, but different lime fast.

Even the "may never drive out again after a cut" is rich in variety: Some shrubs only drive from green shoots, some also drive out of tips of the old (woody) wood, some drive out of any leftover wood. Lavandula angustifolia belongs to the fussy half shrubs, it drives only from green impulses .

So that it does not become too simple: The rules that have hitherto been established in plant research (many half shrubs do not yet know when they will leave the urge to re-emerge) apply in case of doubt only to the original, "real" plants, with the "inventions of the hobby gardening industry "(mass plant breeding), plant researchers are not necessarily concerned.

Cultivars may behave very differently in terms of their ability to re-emerge - and if you now suspect that care is taken in the breeding certain that a plant still remains austriebsfähig when a trimming is once set a little too low, That would be so with responsible breeders, but not necessarily with for-profit ones.

Lavender absolutely needs regular cut
Half shrub, half shrub ago, now specifically to the lavender: Above it has been said that the best lavender should not be cut into the old wood and it could be different in breeding varieties. Would mean that you could possibly cut down cultivars to the old wood. If you do not buy from a nursery that has been cultivating these cultivars for a while, that would be an experiment every time.

Instructions for the "safe" cut

• Cut your lavender regularly from the start
• In the first year before flowering, lavender should develop abundant flowering
• Any new shoot that gets older than a season eventually lightens up
• The result looks like this:

• So the shoots have to be cut down before they start to lignify
• This is when they start producing the fruit for reproduction
• That's why lavender gets a cut just after flowering to take away the entire shrub one third to one half of the new shoot
• This summer cut takes place in the middle of July to beginning of August, later only flowers that have withered away and cut away dry branches, the rest in spring
• The remainder of the new release must now mature to provide protection over the winter
• It is trimmed in the spring, after the last frost and before the shoot, usually at the end of March / beginning of April
• Most gardeners want their lavender to grow larger, taking one to two thirds off in the spring
• Summer cut + spring cut together to remove a maximum of 5/6 of the new shoot, 1/6 remains
• If you do not want to lavender lavender, you would have to cut away the entire new outcrop

But since the distinction between "green" and "woody" is a science in itself (the lignified part does not lignify overnight), the rule of thumb for "delicate shrubs" is to take away most of the renewal until the start of the new growth season, but just cut so deep that you can see a rest of green sprouts (around 1/2 cm).

Tip: If you need lavender in the summer for the vase or for the benefit (cosmetics, drying, etc.), you can gradually liberate the lavender from the young shoots. The necessary lavender cut is then carried out without additional work during and through the regular harvest.