Surfacing at the end of winter like a horticultural life raft, the week-long Philadelphia Flower Show is salvation for gardeners grown weary of cold weather.\u00a0 The Philadelphia Convention Center, a cavernous place, is filled with flowers and plants, from tulips to exotic orchids to beautifully grown succulents.\u00a0 Flowers strut their stuff in display gardens and artfully crafted arrangements.\u00a0 They smile out of frames in the botanical art exhibition and confound you with their perfection in the competitive class area.\u00a0 You can even purchase plants and cut flowers in the sale aisles.\u00a0 The abundance is overwhelming.<\/p>\n
I never come home empty handed, though I have occasionally come home empty walleted.\u00a0 Making my way around the sale aisles, I fixate on something different every year.\u00a0 Unusual African violets claimed my fancy a few years ago.\u00a0 Another year it was a yellow clivia that sang to me from one booth.\u00a0 This year\u2019s fancy was unexpected\u2014lavender.<\/p>\n
I have lots of lavender in my garden and this past summer the plants were magnificent, growing to new heights and producing two, and in some cases three crops of fragrant purple blooms.\u00a0 But the lavender that stole my heart in Philadelphia was not the ordinary Lavendula angustifolia or English lavender.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t even a new angustifolia variety.\u00a0 It was a species that was new to me–fernleaf lavender or Lavendula multifida.\u00a0 I am drawn to plants with interesting common names.\u00a0 In this case, the descriptive \u201cfernleaf\u201d epithet gives way to the even more descriptive \u201cFrench lace\u201d and the intriguing \u201cEgyptian lavender\u201d.<\/p>\n
All lavenders are classified as shrubs or subshrubs.\u00a0 You can see why when you look at the woody plant bases.\u00a0 This does not stop nurseries and garden centers from grouping them with the perennials or, more properly with the herbs.<\/p>\n
The best definition of \u201cherb\u201d I know is \u201cuseful plant\u201d.\u00a0 Ecologically speaking, all plants are useful, because each has a role to play in its particular ecosystem.\u00a0 Herbs, however, are distinguished by the fact that they have been especially useful to human beings, as medicines, cosmetics, air fresheners, dye sources and flavorings for food.\u00a0 Lavender has been used for all those purposes for centuries.\u00a0 These days, even the supermarket aisles are full of the stuff, with lavender scenting everything from furniture polish to bleach.\u00a0 Romans added it to bath water, hence the genus name, which is derived from the Latin \u201clavare\u201d, meaning \u201cto wash\u201d.\u00a0 The scent is reputed to have a calming effect and at various times has been stuffed into small pillows to help insomniacs get to sleep.\u00a0 William Turner, sixteenth century English physician and herbalist, took that idea a bit further, saying, \u201cthe flowers of lavender, quilted in a cap, comfort the brain very well.\u2019<\/p>\n
I am comforted by the sight of my new fernleaf lavender, which is about 18 inches tall and crowned by flower spikes of a very intense blue-purple shade.\u00a0 The flowers and foliage do not seem to have as much fragrance as some of the English or French lavenders, but then again, they are not outside, basking in the sunshine right now, with their essential oils warmed and ready to waft on the breeze.\u00a0 I\u2019ll withhold my judgment until the plants migrate to the porch for late spring\/summer vacation.<\/p>\n
English lavenders have short, needle-like leaves, but the fernleaf species sports feathery or fern-like foliage in a calming shade of gray-green.\u00a0 This makes the plants attractive even when they are not in flowers.\u00a0 They top out at about two feet tall and wide, easily containable in medium size pots.\u00a0 Those pots are necessary, because Lavendula multifida is not hardy in cold winter climates.\u00a0 My fernleaf beauty will have to spend the winter months in the sunny dining room instead of braving the freezing breezes with its cold-tolerant cousins.<\/p>\n
Nature is full of compensations and, in this climate the compensation for fernleaf lavender\u2019s tenderness is that it is somewhat more tolerant of summer humidity than its fragrant fellow travelers.\u00a0 As a dues-paying member of the mint or Labiatae family, it is relatively unattractive to deer, rabbits, groundhogs and other varmints, while being attractive to pollinators.\u00a0 Experts say that fernleaf lavender likes \u201csweet soil\u201d, which means soil that is slightly on the alkaline side of the pH spectrum.\u00a0 Like all lavenders, it also prefers full sun and excellent drainage, so lighten the potting mix with sand or very fine gravel in equal parts.\u00a0 If you want to include it in borders, sink the pots into the ground and dig up in the fall.\u00a0 The best rule of thumb for tender plants like fernleaf lavender is to keep them in the house until night temperatures are consistently above 50 degrees Fahrenheit.<\/p>\n
So what makes fernleaf lavender \u201cEgyptian\u201d to some people?\u00a0 Its origins.\u00a0 Long before Lavendula multifida made its bow at the Philadelphia Flower Show, it hailed from southern Europe through northern Africa, an area that includes Egypt.\u00a0 It is possible that it sweetened the air for the pharaohs just as it sweetens the end of winter for me.<\/p>\n
If you want to add to your lavender collection, try Well-Sweep Herb Farm, which carries an enormous assortment of lavenders, including the fernleaf species.\u00a0 Find them at 205 Mount Bethel Road, Port Murray, NJ 07865-4147, (908) 852-5390; www.wellsweep.com<\/a>.\u00a0 The online catalog can be downloaded from the website.\u00a0 To order a print catalog, contact Department CE100 at Well-Sweep.\u00a0 The print catalog is free.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Surfacing at the end of winter like a horticultural life raft, the week-long Philadelphia Flower Show is salvation for gardeners grown weary of cold weather.\u00a0 The Philadelphia Convention Center, a cavernous place, is filled with flowers and plants, from tulips to exotic orchids to beautifully grown succulents.\u00a0 Flowers strut their stuff in display gardens and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[1602,1598,1603,222,1599,1601,263,283,1600],"class_list":["post-2078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-egyptian-lavender","tag-fernleaf-lavender","tag-french-lace-lavender","tag-herbs","tag-labiatae","tag-lavendula-multifida","tag-mint-family","tag-philadelphia-flower-show","tag-scented-plants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2078"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2079,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions\/2079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}