Munstead Lavender Hedge Plants

Lavandula angustifolia Munstead: Pot Grown Lavender

Munstead has a well-earned reputation as tough, reliable, heavily scented and floriferous. It is one of the most popular members of our range of English lavender, being probably the second best-selling lavender in the UK after Hidcote; its well-proportioned spikes of lilac-blue flowers are a softer, more powdery colour than the deeper purple of Hidcote, and the aromatic leaves are slightly longer, with the same variable greyish green that can appear silvery in some lights. When pruned correctly, it forms lots of shoots so that unlike most plants capable of surviving the hottest Mediterranean summers, it looks soft and fresh and verdant pretty much all year.

See our selection of evergreen hedging or see our full range of hedging plants.

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 or 2 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 2 litre pots.

Features

• Use: Plant at 33cm intervals for hedges and edges or use as a herbaceous perennial
• Height: 50 cm
• Spread: 50 cm
• Colour: lilac/purple flowers
• Shape: medium spike
• Aspect: south facing
• Scent: strong, lavender
• Flowering: summer
• Leaves: evergreen, silvery-green

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

Munstead Lavender in your Garden

Lavenders are the superheroes of the garden being almost indestructible in the right location, with their ability to tolerate drought or stony soil, be immune to disease and to 'give back' the whole year round. And Munstead is top of the class in all respects. It will frame any number of herbaceous perennials - Achilleas, Peonies, Penstemons - but is renowned for combining with roses. It associates particularly well with yellow, orange or white roses like Fruhlingsgold or Jacqueline du Pre or Lady Marmalade.

But its drama lies in being grown as a hedge, especially along a path of grey stone or gravel where it intercedes between hard and soft landscaping and merges the two so that the effect is seamless. In fact, in order to satisfy its need for warmth, you can grow it surrounded by dark slate which will absorb and reflect the heat of the sun and make it feel right at home.

Lavender is often regarded as a herb being part of the medicinal and culinary pharmacopoeia and as such has a rightful place in the herb garden along with all the other wonderful smells and colours that pertain to Mediterranean herbs.

Did You Know?

Munstead Wood was the garden created by Gertrude Jekyll and, unusually, it came before the house designed by Edwin Lutyens that sits in it. Jekyll was a masterful plantswoman and grew and bred her own plants to her exacting standards, studying habit, culture, form and colour. These she would then use in her garden designs which embraced the precepts of the Arts and Crafts movement as exemplified by William Morris.