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Lavender

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Behind the bridge, in a narrow street there is a small shop smelling of sweet balm, lavender and cinnamon…
Well, that´s a song of my youth…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoG39BdpYLA
Maybe it made me to love lavenders so much. I have them in my garden and use their flowers into bunches….although would like to have all varieties. I heard there are about 30 different sorts, maybe more.

It fits very well with other mediterranean herbs, like Santolina….they both smell like heaven in a sunny summer day, when planted along paths…Santolina smells like curry and lavender like a good perfume.

I usually cut lavender in July and make simple bunches. I use them either in the room or put them later among clothes in the wardrobe.

This can be made from dried lavenders later in the winter, when flowers start to drop down from bunches. Suitable for a small table.


Dried lavender flowers, peeled from stem and mixed with dried rose buds look very nice, but also smell nice, so I put them somewhere where I can see it not just smell it.


Or I fill small sachets with them…the notoriously known usage…

I never did lavender wreath and of course never made lavender oil. But the one from Provence is the best anyway.
Looking for the summer :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH8MRgaUHsg

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Comments

 

What lovely photos and how wonderful to think of lavender on such a cold winter's day!

23 Feb, 2013

 

Lovely Kat, I do like my lavender too, so useful. :-)

23 Feb, 2013

 

Thank you very much, Louisa and enjoy GoY as much as possible.
Slad@this is one of the most useful plants in the garden and does require only 15 minutes of care per year.

23 Feb, 2013

 

The Bees love it too !

24 Feb, 2013

 

Nice to read about the lavender :o)))

24 Feb, 2013

 

I love the smell of lavender and do have some in my wardrobes, another habit picked up from my mum....

25 Feb, 2013

 

In poor families of wine growers, which had just earthn floor in a dining room, they used to scatter dried lavender flowers on the floor. Thus the room smelled nice when people walked across it.

25 Feb, 2013

 

I love lavender - and my grandmother used to grow it. She made lovely sachets every year. The lavender would be spread out to dry on newspaper on the spare bedroom floor. The scent was wonderful. I remember one year, workmen came to lay a cable in her garden. She was out, and when she returned they had finished and left, having dug up the whole of her lavender hedge and left the plants uprooted in the sun. She was in tears and SO angry. I was only young. I understand now exactly how she must have felt. She lost a great many of her precious plants. I grow lavender in remembrance of her. I always have a big bunch in the front porch, which it perfumes all through the year. I think it is a very special plant.

25 Feb, 2013

 

Yes, that must have been infarction inducing situation. Poor grandma.

25 Feb, 2013

 

Yes. :-(

25 Feb, 2013

 

I had similar experience. Once a guy from Prague came to visit us in the evening, he was little bit tipsy and brought a bunch of roses to mother. In the morning we found, that he had cut our roses in the front garden.
;-)

26 Feb, 2013

 

I love the plant, we have grown it for many many years all sizes and all colours, a lot die on us every year, because of the wet, not so much the cold, and will continue to grow it in one form or another, thanks for the blog.....

26 Feb, 2013

 

Oh Katarina! That sounds like a scene from a silent film - I can just picture him staggering from bush to bush, picking the best ones. I wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry...

26 Feb, 2013

 

We were pleased and obliged to him that evening. Not the other day, lol.
I wonder, if there is something like "English lavender". When I was a teenager, I attended private lessons of English. My teacher was old lady, who had lived in Britain many years ago. She had received from friends in the UK lavender plants and she gave me one. It was extremely high, almost 1 m bush and it bloomed for almost two decades. Since that time I have never seen so big lavenders here.

27 Feb, 2013

 

You have reminded me to get some more plants.

1 Mar, 2013

 

Lavendula Angustifolia is probably the lavender you are thinking of, Katarina. It can grow quite large - I always cut mine back each year after flowering otherwise they get very leggy and twiggy. In the right place, though, they can last well. I have four in my herb bed and usually replace them every few years. Yours must have been an exceptional specimen to last so well. (Not that they don't last, they just lose their shape and end up very woody at the base and in the middle.)

1 Mar, 2013

 

Hi Melchi@majority of my lavenders are L. augustifolia. But they never reached size of that one, in spite they grow on a full sun.

3 Mar, 2013

 

It's strange how sometimes a particular specimen just takes off! I wonder if it's the unique position it's in, or a peculiar characteristic of the plant itself.

4 Mar, 2013

 

Yes, I do not know. The same experience I have with the rosemaries. Some grow like bush, some stay small. Like people ;-)

5 Mar, 2013

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