Plant · P-599

Lavender English

Lavandula angustifolia

English Lavender is a rounded evergreen shrub grown for its fragrant flowers, used fresh or dried in cooking, brewed as a calming tea, and distilled into an essential oil for perfumes and soaps. Its nectar-rich flowers draw bees, butterflies and moths through the summer, and it makes a fine low hedge from the dwarf forms. It wants full sun and poor, sharply drained soil - rich ground actually produces more leaf and less of the oil that makes it worth growing. Heat and wet roots kill it far more readily than cold does, and where summers run long, hot and humid it struggles enough that the related lavandin hybrids are usually the better choice.