Lavandula
Lavandula spp.
Special Features
Highly prized for fragrant flowers, ornamental value, and various practical uses. Flowers grow in spikes atop long stems, small, tubular, and highly fragrant. Flowers come in shades of purple, blue, pink, and white.
Plant Specifications
Our team will help you integrate this plant into your landscape design
Growing Lavandula on Martha's Vineyard
Lavandula angustifolia, the English lavender, is one of the most beloved and appropriate perennials for Martha's Vineyard's full-sun, well-drained coastal garden conditions, thriving in the lean, sandy, alkaline-tending soils of oceanfront and near-coastal properties throughout the island with a natural affinity born of the Mediterranean climate conditions those soils approximate. Its intensely fragrant silver foliage and violet-blue flower spikes from late June through August are quintessential elements of the island's cottage garden and formal landscape traditions, and the fragrance is particularly compelling in the ocean-freshened air of Vineyard Sound-facing properties in Edgartown and Vineyard Haven.
Deer reliably avoid lavender, consistent with all strongly aromatic sub-shrubs. Estate Care professionals cut lavender back by one-third to one-half in early spring before new growth begins, never cutting into old wood, and treat this annual shearing as the single most important cultural practice for maintaining the compact, floriferous, long-lived plants that define a professionally maintained lavender planting.
