Hidcote Blue Lavender Plants

Lavandula angustifolia Hidcote: Pot Grown Lavender

Hidcote is the most popular lavender in the UK. Quintessentially British, it is ideal as a low hedging and edging plant for rose borders and kitchen gardens. The flowers are an imperial, deep purple with a good balance between the height of its foliage and flower spikes. It is bushy, but a little shorter than other English lavender varieties, although there is not much in it.
It grows more slowly than Munstead and retains its scent wonderfully throughout the summer and even after its flowers have been dried. As with all lavender, neither mice nor rabbits nor deer can abide them making them almost pest-proof.

Delivery season: This is weather dependent. At present we expect to have plants ready from the end of April onwards, but if the weather is cold dates can slip into May. There is nothing to be gained from trying to plant lavender out before nighttime temperatures rise consistently as the shock simply sets it back, and it establishes more slowly and flowers less well than lavender planted when everything is warmer. The smallest lavenders, in P9 pots, are never shipped before May in any event. If you are not happy with these potentially uncertain timings, please order elsewhere: we guarantee our plants and like to see them do well...

Choosing a size:

• For window boxes and other cramped spaces, start with the smallest plants, which come in P9 pots and are a year old. If you plant them outside, do it from the end of May when the soil is nice and warm. They are the cheapest way to buy a lavender hedge, but you will have to wait a year or two longer for them to knit together.
• For borders, hedges and edges, two-year-old plants in 1 litre pots are ideal. You get more root and more flower in the first year, and they do not look lost planted at one plant every 13" (33cms). By the end of the first summer, they will have joined up.
• For specimen shrubs that provide instant impact, buy larger plants in 3 litre pots.

Features

• Use: Plant at 33cm intervals for hedges and edges or use as a herbaceous perennial
• Height: 45 cm
• Spread: 45 cm
• Colour: dark purple flowers
• Shape: medium spike
• Aspect: south facing
• Soil: Well drained is vital, and on the poor side is ideal.
• Scent: strong, lavender
• Flowering: June/July-September
• Leaves: evergreen, silvery-green
• RHS Award of Garden Merit

Growing Hidcote Lavender

All lavender must have good drainage and close to full sun. They prefer poor soil and will thrive in exposed coastal sites. When established, they are pretty much totally drought-tolerant, but in the first and second year you should water them as you would any other new shrub to make sure they establish well.

There is an art to keeping lavender going year in and year out and preventing it from becoming woody. There are different approaches to this, but the essential thing is to cut all the new growth down to two or three buds in the second half of August or early September, once the flowers have faded.

Spacing a Hidcote Lavender hedge: Like most formal hedging, plant at 3 per metre, 33cm apart in a single row.

Hidcote Lavender in your Garden

Grown as a hedge, the silvery foliage reflects the light onto whatever it surrounds. Its narrow, evergreen leaves are a joy throughout the year; the flowers are really a bonus. Left to itself, it forms a rounded, palest green-grey bush that adds structure in a herbaceous bed.

Lavenders play an enormously important role in any eco-garden, being irresistible to bees and butterflies, which is extra valuable to fruit and veg growers.

The violet of Hidcote goes well with pink roses like Nathalie Nypels, La Rose de Molinard or Souvenir de la Malmaison. In a potager, Hidcote lavender makes a welcome change from Box (Buxus sempevirens) when used as elegant, dark flowered edging for a bed full of herbs which often have purple flowers themselves.

Being reasonably petite, it makes a good front to an herbaceous border to soften the boundary between border and grass or gravel.

Did You Know?

Hidcote Manor is in Gloucestershire and was bought by Lawrence Johnston’s mother. Lawrence went on to create this famous Arts and Crafts garden, beginning in 1910. He chose his plants meticulously, and selected this narrow leaved lavender along with a Penstemon 'Hidcote Pink' and a St John's Wort 'Hidcote Gold'.