It’s a proper English garden staple that rewards us with fragrant blooms year after year. Lavender comes in various shades of purple or lilac and is a gorgeous plant to grow in your outdoor area. 

This beautifully-scented favourite can be grown in pots or popped into your borders – and it’s a wonderful plant for attracting pollinators too.

Bees, butterflies, hoverflies and moths all love this fragrant flowering plant and the essence of lavender has been used for hundreds of years to heal burns and other ailments.

The scent of lavender is relaxing too, but there’s something that you can do now to keep this stunning herb looking and smelling fantastic for longer.

As the lavender plant flowers you’ll see an abundance of floral heads – new ones will be coming through as older ones die away.

The best way to ensure your lavender keeps going is to dead head the old flowers as they die.

This is a task that can be carried out regularly to keep the plant in good health, it’s best done gradually – and there’s no need to cut back the newer foliage.

RHS explains the importance of deadheading lavender on their website: “Cut off spent blooms to encourage more to form.

“However, you can leave them in place towards the end of the flowering season as food for seed-eating birds such as goldfinches.”

Deadheading the plant will lead to many more new flowers coming through – the process encourages a second round of floral displays in some varieties of the herb.

Spanish lavenders are a type that really benefit from some deheading, experts say, so you can always remove most to enhance growth, but leave a few for the birds if you wish.

Deadheading can be done in these easy steps – firstly look and see which flowers are drying and spent.

Then follow the stem back to the base stopping when you reach the first leaves of the plant – cut it here.

Then you simply repeat this will all the flowers that need to be deadheaded – and hopefully await a second flush of lavender blooms.

The great added bonus is that you can keep cut  lavender even before deadheading – and use the floral stems in your home.

One of lavender’s many benefits is that the fragrance continues even when the flowering stems are cut or dried.

These flowering stems can be placed in your home, in a pretty display, or even in your drawers and wardrobes as the scent of lavender helps to keep clothes moths away.

Lavender is fairly low maintenance and doesn’t need feeding with fertiliser unlike many other plants – it does however prefer to be in a sunny spot in the garden.

This herbaceous plant does not need a lot of water either and needs to be in a pot or garden area with good drainage so it doesn’t get waterlogged.