When and How to Prune Lavender Plants in 5 Simple Steps
Knowing how to prune lavender is an important part of keeping this plant healthy and looking its best. When to prune lavender is also key, but don’t worry, pruning this herb isn’t too tricky. A little careful trimming can rejuvenate your plants and provide you with armloads of fragrant lavender for recipes, crafting, and flower arrangements. This guide will help you time your pruning efforts appropriately and make the best cuts.
Why Prune Lavender?
Pruning lavender each year provides several benefits including:
- Refining the shape of the plants
- Encouraging bushier growth
- Producing more flowers
- Preventing woody and leggy stems with sparse growth
If you need more reasons to prune lavender, pruning is also the easiest way to get lots of fresh lavender for recipes like lemon-lavender cookies and herbal tea. You can also propagate the cuttings from your lavender shrubs and produce new lavender plants for your garden for free.
When to Prune Lavender
Prune lavender plants at least once a year, although some gardeners prune them two or three times in a single growing season. The most important time to prune lavender is immediately after the plant flowers in summer to early fall, although you may want to give your plants a second pruning later in the season if they produce an additional flush of flowers. Because pruned lavender can be more susceptible to winter damage, stop pruning your lavender plants six weeks before your area’s first frost date.
You can also prune lavender in the spring, but this can be tricky, especially with deciduous varieties. Lavender plants often won’t grow when they are cut back into their woody sections. For this reason, if you prune lavender in spring, always wait for new leaves to sprout to avoid cutting into the woody section of the plant.
First-year lavender plants benefit from pruning, but it’s even more important to prune mature lavender. If you begin pruning lavender in its first year, you can shape the plant more easily, and pruning will encourage more vigorous growth and bushier stems.
5 Steps for Pruning Lavender
If you’re new to pruning lavender, it’s often easiest to begin with a late-summer to early-fall pruning. You can always follow up with a spring pruning if you need to refine the look of the plant further. The following steps work well on any kind of lavender, although you may want to be less aggressive with your pruning cuts if you grow French or Spanish lavender varieties.
1. Choose the right time to prune.
The best time to prune lavender is usually immediately after the plant stops flowering, usually in late summer to early fall. Don’t prune lavender too late in the season, as plants pruned right before frost may not handle the cold well.
2. Clean your tools.
Before pruning lavender, always disinfect your tools with rubbing alcohol to prevent the spread of plant diseases. You may also want to sharpen the blades before you work to ensure that the cuts are nice and clean.
3. Cut the green stems.
Gather up a section of lavender stems in one hand and cut them off with pruners at least 2–3 inches above where the woody section of the plant begins. Continue this process, gathering up and pruning away lavender stems until you’ve cut the plant down by about one-third. If you’re working with only a few lavender plants, this is easy enough to do with pruners, but you may want to use shears for a large shrub or hedge.
4. Shape the plant.
As you work, try to maintain the rounded look of the lavender plant by trimming stems slightly shorter toward the perimeter of the plant and leaving them a bit longer at the plant’s center. This creates a refined, mounded plant silhouette, but don’t worry too much about making your cuts perfect.
5. Do a follow-up trimming.
While it’s not strictly necessary if you prune your lavender in autumn, you may want to lightly trim it again in spring to clean up the lines of the plant and remove any winter-damaged stems. Just keep in mind that spring pruning may diminish the amount of flowers your plant produces, so it’s best to prune early before flower buds appear.
Spring pruning should only occur after the plant begins to sprout new leaves. Pruning deciduous lavender plants before they begin to leaf out is difficult, and you run the risk of cutting into the woody sections of the plant.
Can Woody Lavender Be Saved?
Most often, the suggested remedy for woody lavender is to pull out the plant and start over. There’s no doubt that rehabbing woody lavender takes some time, and it isn’t always successful. However, if you’re willing to take a chance on an old lavender plant, it may just be worth it.
Rejuvenating woody lavender is usually performed over the course of three or four years. Instead of pruning the entire plant back at one time, the lavender plant should be pruned section by section, allowing the plant to recover for several months between prunings. It’s best to prune woody lavender in spring by cutting stems down by one-third to one-half. Make the cuts in the green sections of the plant and only cut into the woody sections if you need to remove dead or damaged branches.