I have killed three lavender plants. The fourth is blooming beside the porch steps this week, and every time I go up or down I brush my hand across it, partly for the smell and partly to make sure it's real.
Three lavenders, three wet winters
The first was in the summer of 2020, my first real year of porch pots. It lived in a little terra cotta pot on the bench, and I left it out all winter sitting in a saucer. By March it was a gray twig in a block of soggy soil.
The second went into the front border in 2022, in our heavy soil, with a nice thick blanket of shredded-leaf mulch tucked around it the way I mulch everything else. It rotted at the crown before spring.
The third came from the nursery in 2024 and went into a corner of the west raised bed, in rich compost, watered right along with the lettuce. It was gone by the spring of 2025.
It took three tries to see the pattern. English lavender handles our zone 6b winters on paper. The cold wasn't what killed them. It was wet roots in cold soil, month after month. Every one of those plants was in a spot I'd made comfortable for vegetables, which is exactly what lavender doesn't want.
Number four, and the gritty corner
Number four was Mateo's Mother's Day present last year, a quart pot of 'Munstead' he picked out himself. Killing three lavenders I'd bought was one thing. I was not going to kill a present from my son.
So it went into the hottest, driest spot I have that isn't on the porch: the corner beside the porch steps, where it gets full afternoon sun, heat off the steps and some shelter from the porch roof. I dug a hole about 18 inches wide and a foot deep and mixed the soil half and half with coarse sand and pea gravel from a bag Nate had in the basement. No compost at all. I set the plant slightly high, on a low mound, so the crown sits above the soil around it, and ringed it with gravel instead of leaves. I watered it for the first month and then mostly left it alone. All of last summer it got water maybe five times.
Then came the winter: a hard freeze on November 2, snow from December into March, a few nights in the single digits. My only rules were that snow shoveled off the porch steps got thrown the other way, and that those steps got sand instead of salt. In March the plant looked gray and finished, and I made myself wait. In mid-April new green showed up at the base of the stems. Once it did, I cut the plant back by about a third, into the green growth and never into bare old wood, and it filled out from there.
It even survived the porch repair. While Kevin worked on the southwest corner from June 1 to 4, lumber and tools came and went right past those steps, so it spent four days under an upside-down laundry basket.
Blooming this week
The leaves are silver-green, and the flower spikes are a deep violet that goes almost blue in the late afternoon when the sun comes across the porch. From about three o'clock on, the bumblebees work it so steadily that the stems never stop moving.
School ends on June 25, and on Monday I'm cutting a dozen stems for the kindergartners. We're going to draw them, then smell them, then draw them again and see whether the second drawing comes out different. In my experience it usually does. The stems go to school, not into our house. Lavender is on the list of plants that aren't good for cats, and Pim chews anything with a stem, so the lavender stays outside, by the steps, where it has finally decided to live.
Next year: root a few cuttings in August, so there's a number five waiting just in case.
