Grow Lusher Lavender With This One Simple Switch – Try it in June for More Flowers and Drifts of Fabulous Fragrance

Lavender deserves a place in every garden, and this easy addition will make your plant feel more at home and produce abundant flowers and more of that exquisite fragrance. It takes minutes to do and works however you grow lavender, whether that's in a pot, a raised bed or in the ground, for all lavender varieties and types.

This perfumed perennial herb, loved for its tall spikes of purple flowers and silvery evergreen foliage, is native to the drier, warmer regions of the Mediterranean basin. From southern Europe to north Africa, western Asia and India, lavender thrives in the full sun and well-drained soil of harsh mountainous and coastal environments and has evolved to flourish with little in the way of water or nutrients.

Now, does this habitat sound like the conditions you’re raising your lavender in? Because if you’re growing Lavandula in a rich potting mix or compost-improved soil and feeding it in the hope of growing a bigger plant and more flowers, you’re missing a trick. Because the key to success with lavender is to mimic the conditions it naturally grows in, which is easily done with a mulch of sand and gravel.

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June is lavender's primary growing month, when it's forming lots of flowerbuds so, make the switch now to give your plant the conditions it craves, and you'll see fast results.

How to Mulch Lavender

Whether your lavender is in a planter or in the ground, top-dress the surrounding soil with a 1-2 inch layer of coarse sand and gravel. Use a ratio of three parts gravel to one part sand.

This helps the plant in multiple ways:

• The coarse sand naturally moves down into the soil and gradually improves drainage.
• The gravel improves airflow around the base of the plant and keeps the growing environment drier.
• The gravel also reflects sunlight onto the plant, and retains warmth.
• Weeds are suppressed, as with any mulch.

Finer gravel such as pea gravel like this from Amazon brings best results, though you can use use any type of gravel you already have. It’s important to use coarse sand, though, and preferably sand intended for horticultural use like this from Amazon. Don’t use fine play sand as it can compact and clump together when wet, defeating the purpose of your dry mulch.

If your lavender is currently mulched with organic matter such as bark chips, rake this layer off the soil surface first. An organic mulch works in the opposite way to a gravel mulch, holding moisture around the plant – leading to conditions that lavender hates, and even rotting stems and roots.

Leave a 3-inch gap all around the plant’s core woody stems, and extend the mulch past its outer extremities, or to the pot rim. The further you extend the mulch, the drier and warmer a microclimate you'll create. Visit any lavender field or farm and you'll see how it's done, and how effective this dry mulch is.

What Else You Can Do to Help Lavender Thrive

Giving your lavender plant a sand and gravel mulch is the very best thing you can do to help it thrive. But there are a number of other ways to foster conditions that your plant will flourish in.

1. Skip the fertilizer

For a start, don’t feed lavender plants. Lavender thrives in poor, nutrient-deficient soils and over-fertilizing it stresses the plant, results in weak, floppy growth and can significantly reduce the number of flowers produced. Even in a container, where the plant has limited access to nutrients, it’s better to refresh the top layer of potting mix every year rather than apply fertilizer.

2. Don’t Overwater

While lavender plants should be regularly watered when first planted, once they’ve had a chance to grow their roots down into the ground to source their own moisture supply, gradually reduce how often you irrigate. Depending on your USDA zone, lavender plants will happily rely on rainwater for most of the year, and you need only water once every couple or weeks through prolonged dry spells of weather. Don’t worry if your lavender is planted among perennials that need watering more often: as long as your soil drains well (and your new sand and gravel mulch will aid good drainage), your plant will be fine.

3. Improve Drainage

Lavender planted in pots needs watering more often, but only when the top couple of inches of potting soil are dry. What containerized lavender plants really need is great drainage. Improve it by drilling extra drainage holes into the pot base, moving your plant into a porous terracotta pot, or raising the pot up on risers so roots don't sit in a puddle of water after heavy rain.

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4. Count the Sunshine Hours

For maximum production of that fabulously fragranced oil, lavender needs at least six hours of sunshine a day through spring and summer. Check just how much your plant gets as the season progresses, and make sure it’s not getting shaded out as its neighbors grow.

5. Prune twice a year

A trim in early spring, and again once it’s finished flowering, will encourage healthy, bushy growth. Pruning lavender is an easy job. Make the spring trim light, just to tidy up your plant after winter, and do any shaping in late summer. Then, as long as you leave at least a half-inch of this summer’s growth (you’ll be able to see the difference between this year’s fresh growth and the older, darker, woodier growth), cut off as much as you want to, depending on whether you want to keep your plant compact or let it grow bigger. Leaving this half-inch safety margin means you’ll never cut into the old growth, which the plant may struggle to resprout from.

Lavender’s ability to adapt to diverse environments is one of the reasons why it’s been cultivated for so many centuries, across the globe, so it likely already grows pretty well in your garden, whatever conditions you’ve given it. But just wait till you make your lavender feel properly at home with a sand and gravel mulch: your plant will flourish, and your reward will be more of its glorious flowers and gorgeous fragrance.