The lavender kill job

There are many mysteries in gardening. Why do plants bolt? Why are some hydrangeas purple and blue? And why is the dog called ‘Nigel’ and the TV presenter called ‘Monty’ when really it should be the other way round...

Added to that, we can firmly add, why does my wife kill so many lavender plants? Those of you who have had the rib-dislocating pleasure of reading the Grumpy Gardener’s Handbook will know her as ‘Leaf Lady’ someone with an OCD compulsion to track down the owners of leaves who stray into our garden.

But that book was written when we lived next to Mrs MacDonald (aye laddy) in Hinchley Wood and had a block paving frontage to maintain. Now we have a lawn and a gravel drive in front of the house she has realised there are greater challenges in life.

It’s true, she still has it in for house plants. When unsuspecting house plants get taken back to our gaff they don’t see the outline of a 1930s suburban house. They see the outline of the Bates Motel accompanied by that screeching violin sound effect. She has a fearsome ability to bump them off that is second to none.

The reason for this is her bizarre watering regime. She employs what I like to call her ‘desert-mangrove technique’ for watering. When the exhausted plant finally withers and fails it’s put out on the back doorstep, a bit like in Game of Thrones when the Wildling babies are put out in the woods as offerings to the White Walkers.

She has always been a big fan of lavender - all varieties - and loves to have them in the garden. The first years is not normally a problem, the plants bloom, are appreciated, and everything in the garden is…er…well, lavendery. It’s the tricky second year when problems arise. If she leaves them as they are, unpruned, they begin to look straggly and leggy the following year.

And so the following year she prunes them really hard. And then they die.

We buy some more. She splits her strategy and prunes some hard, some lightly, and gives some that old barber shop favourite, ‘the medium trim’. Both the lightly pruned and the heavily pruned lavenders die. The ‘medium trim’ escapes and is pictured above. Some of it has died, some if it has survived. It’s living, but it’s not really living.

This apparent lavender barbarism is not through lack of care either, she looks up ‘How to prune lavender’ videos on YouTube, takes advice from gardening friends, but all to no avail. We have never possessed a lavender more than three years.

I like to bolster her flagging morale by saying, “well, at least you’re not a 17th century perfumier, otherwise you’d be off to the poor house, wouldn’t you.” It’s amazing how little things like that can help cheer up a gardening partner…