Lavender

Last summer I had one lavender plant.  At the end of the summer it was healthy and I couldn’t bear to see it succumb to the first frost, so I brought it inside and hauled it up to my bedroom and placed it next to the west window for the winter.

Before long the lavender plant was absolutely miserable.  It didn’t like short winter days.  Sometimes I forgot to water it enough because it was upstairs and I wasn’t thinking about it.  Sometimes I overwatered it.  The sun never seemed bright enough for this plant.   It grew spindly and the leaves turned a sickly light green.  No matter what, whether the soil in the container was we or dry, it had a wilted appearance.  I nearly threw the lavender plant out on several occasions, but it managed to survive until spring, when I hauled the dusty thing back down stairs and set it on the deck.

Within days its leaves thickened up and new leaves started budding out all over.  A few weeks later blossom shoots started springing out all over the place, and before long the plant was going crazy!  Right now it looks beautiful (these pictures don’t do it justice at all) and smells astonishing.  My whole deck smells like lavender because not knowing how the old wilted lavender plant was going to fare, I bought two more smaller lavender plants this spring.  I wanted to make sure I had enough lavender to make simple syrup for lavender lemonade.  (Which I am still perfecting).

A few years ago I was apathetic about the smell of lavender.  It was OK, but I didn’t love it. Over the last year and a half, somehow my brain trained itself to calm down with the presence of a lavender aroma.  Ahhh!  I know some people believe that lavender really does calm people down, and maybe it does.  Or maybe my brain just trained itself to calm with the trigger of the scent.  Regardless, my deck is currently a place of deep breathing, calmness and goodness.