Lavender Phenomenal is one of the hardiest evergreen lavenders around. It handles heat, humidity and rough Winter weather with ease! Learn why you will love this lavender!
A few years ago, I shared a post here on Pet Scribbles about how to harvest lavender the easy way.
A reader asked what type of lavender I had in my garden, and I realized I need to do a post on here about my favorite lavender that we grow.
It’s called Lavender Phenomenal — and I think its name is perfect!
Phenomenal, in fact!
Lavender Phenomenal Highlights
Lavender Phenomenal — or you can also call it Phenomenal Lavender — is one of the hardiest lavenders around! Many gardening experts say it may be the toughest lavender there is!
The main reason for its appeal is, in fact, its toughness.
This lavender can easily handle heat and humidity, which makes it perfect for any part of the country where humid Summers can be tricky for other varieties of lavender. This lavender has great disease resistance.
Rough Winter weather is also not a problem for this Lavender. It maintains its color in Winter when most other lavenders would suffer and die back.
I’m in zone 7b here in southern New Jersey, and Lavender Phenomenal stays evergreen for us. It has a pretty gray-blue color in Winter, shifting to more of a gray-blue-green in Summer.
I’ve seen it called “ever-gray” instead of evergreen. I like that!
The secondary appeal — at least for me — is that Lavender Phenomenal was discovered, developed and bred by Lloyd Travan at his Peace Tree Farm in Pennsylvania. I love that a tough lavender was cultivated right here in the United States!
How to care for your Lavender Phenomenal
Lavender Phenomenal is an evergreen perennial shrub, with a USDA hardiness zones 5 through 9 or 10.
Helpful tip: I find that zone numbers for Lavender Phenomenal vary on different garden websites. Your local nursery experts will know best what will grow in your specific region.
Soil: This lavender is such a hardy and reliable perennial and doesn’t need any type of fancy care for it to thrive, other than it doesn’t like heavy wet soils like clay.
We have clay soil — but we amended our soil a few years back with compost and manure and the lavender is happy and thriving!
Make sure your soil has good drainage.
Water: doesn’t require much. Just make sure to give it adequate water when first planted.
I find that perennials in general need more water during their first planting season than they will require in subsequent seasons as their roots expand and the plant matures.
Sun: full sun is best.
Size: grows to 2’ to 3’ tall and wide, with 5-inch flower spikes.
Resistant to: deer, rabbits, squirrels
Attracts: bees and butterflies
Trial and Error
I had been growing other varieties of lavender in our backyard and had some success with them.
I was growing Munstead and Hidcote varieties, and tried growing Spanish Lavender as well. These lavenders didn’t always survive the Winters here, and what DID survive definitely looked ragged by the Springtime.
Try, try again — Fall 2014
We planted our Lavender Phenomenal in September 2014, when we had our front yard grass removed and lots of garden beds and pavers installed instead.
It was a major renovation and makeover, with a few minor blips along the way. (Read my top tips on planning a landscape makeover.)
I was impressed with these little lavender plants over the Winter months, as they seemed to keep their color, but I still wondered if they would survive.
Spring and Summer 2015
The Lavender did survive, and looked good the following Spring:
But July of that year, these small plants had grown gorgeous lavender stems:
This was our first blooming season too, and this Lavender bloomed reliably all Summer long and into the Fall.
Oh these special lavender flowers
Phenomenal Lavender is a reliable bloomer with a long blooming period.
The lavender scent is wonderful: strong but not overwhelming. (This lavender has a high content of essential oils, which contributes to its amazing scent.)
The color is stunning! You get that color year after year, with no fading from the sun like I’ve experienced with some other lavenders.
Fresh cut or dry
You can cut the stems for pretty cut flowers that will last a long time, or leave the lavender to dry on the stems for an even longer color show.
As the lavender flowers dry on the stems, it continues to look lovely in the garden!
The dried lavender is easy to harvest — see my easy how-to post here — and can be used for crafts and potpourri.
Pruning
I prune my lavender in the fall by removing the dried stems plus shaping up the shrubs a bit. The color is still so pretty, and everything is neat and tidy, ready for the Winter.
Lavender Phenomenal in Winter
We had a harsh Winter this year plus quite a few late Winter-early Spring snowstorms that brought the heavy, wet snow that can just crush plants if not brushed off.
Yet our Phenomenal Lavender was just fine!
And by the end of the Winter, it has more of a blue-gray cast to it:
Lavender Phenomenal in Spring
I love how the color of Lavender Phenomenal accents the early blooming evergreen perennials each Spring, like the white Candytuft and the purple Heather below:
This year, the new growth began in early May:
I love the color contrast between the green leaves of the ornamental Japanese maple and the lavender:
By the end of May, the stems were visible!
The hint of blooms is also visible:
Lavender Phenomenal in Summer
When the plants are in full bloom, it’s like having your very own lavender field in your garden:
I shot this short video of the blooming lavender and the various bumble bees enjoying these plants all Summer long!
Gorgeous, right?
So there you have it:
The best lavender for heat and humidity is Lavender Phenomenal!
Happy gardening!
Hi Laura! Brenda Sturgis here. I was reading your article on lavendar. I have a beautiful lavendar bush that produces beautiful flower spikes. Will this work as well? Not sure what kind of lavendar it is.
Hi Brenda,
Yes – go for it! For the majority of articles you’ll see on harvesting and drying lavender, specific varieties never seem to be mentioned. I happened to write this article almost as an afterthought, since I had a reader ask what type of lavender I had dried. I think the main thing — for me — is that I love the look of lavender ON the bushes, and the thought of having to cut them off in their prime blooming time breaks my heart. I’d rather enjoy my blooms on the shrubs, rather than have them hanging in some dark closet upside down. That’s why I suggest letting them do their drying while on the shrubs. You still will have pretty color and be able to enjoy their scent longer too! Let me know how it goes!
Thanks Laura! Our bush is maybe three years old, but 8s just beautiful and huge! Lol! I thought about doing something with it last year but just didn’t. Will definitely try some things this year!
Brenda Sturgis
Definitely let me know how you do! If you’ve got a large shrub — you’ll no doubt be able to get a lot of lavender off of the plant!
HI Laura, So i did nothing with my lavender in the fall. So now that is spring time in PA I can see new growth at the bottom of the stems but the rest all look dead. Do you think that I can trim it down now and it will still grow back or should I just let it go until the fall then trim it down? I dont know what to do with it and I dont want to kill it cause I love my lavender! Please help! lol
Hi Jenn,
Thanks for asking! If you see new growth at the bottom of your stems, but not at the top of the stems, I’d wait just a bit — maybe a few more weeks — to see if any new growth starts to appear along the stems as well as at the top of the stems. (My own lavender seems to start new growth primarily at the top of the stems, so I have to be patient with any ugly old stuff to see if new growth will appear on it.) The main thing to remember for lavender is never cut it down into the old woody parts where there is only old (dead-ish, for lack of a better word LOL) parts of the plant. With the warmer weather kicking in (finally!), you might not have to wait long to see if more new growth appears along those stems. I hope this helps!
Hi Laura Hello from England! Thank you for sharing your lavender knowledge! This spring my lavender bushes have grown huge but haven’t fully flowered yet. I’ll wait until they have and allow the flowers to dry off on their stems then I’ll harvest them. I’ve missed the window to harvest in previous years but as I have more time at home now as a result of the coronavirus, I won’t let that happen this year! Xx
Hello from across the pond Angie! I’m glad you will harvest your lavender this year. There are days where it is such a welcoming fragrance, especially indoors in the middle of Winter! Keep me posted and do stop by again!
I live in Illinois and grow this lavender also. Love it but it is pretty woody. I should have read a previous reply before I trimmed this morning. I did cut out some of the dried brownish small branches. There was no new growth on them. Have you ever transplanted any of them? I have one that I feel should be moved but am almost afraid of losing it.
Hi Nancy, Although I’ve never personally transplanted this particular plant, I can hopefully give you some advice. If I decided to transplant one of my Lavender Phenomenal plants, I would wait until cooler weather right now. Early Fall is best, so that the plant suffers less from transplant shock and also so the roots have time to get established a bit before cold weather sets in. Next, I would make sure to dig around the roots not only on the sides of the roots but well “below” the roots too. (In other words, picture a shovel with a lot of dirt underneath the plant, which contains the roots and then dirt below those roots.) Yes, it might make for a heavy job, and a big hole to fill up, but your plant will thank you because there will be little to no disturbance to it. The roots won’t realize they’ve been moved because they continue to be surrounded by dirt and whatever helpful organisms are already in your soil.
When my own plants became a bit woody on the bottoms this year, I decided to fill them in with new small plantings of Lavender Phenomenal that I purchased online in the Spring. With the pandemic, I never received the seedlings until the early Summer, but they seem to be doing well. My hope is that they will fill in where the older woody plants have stopped growing down low.
Don’t lose hope about those woody stems either, as I’ve been pleasantly surprised that every so often, new growth WILL appear out of them. Not often, but it does happen. Keep me posted on what you decide to do!
Nice article! So I am 97% sure this is the type of lavender that I have that is doing very well. I have also had good success with cuttings, I read somewhere to scrape off the stem before plunging it into the dirt which I have done, making sure it stays in a shady area till it forms roots, and have been pretty much successful doing that. My question is, mine does not seem to bloom all summer and I’m unsure whether to give it a haircut, deadhead it, or what to have continued blooms all summer.. do you have any words of wisdom!? I really love that lavender is so… Independent! It doesn’t require much in our hot humid Arkansas summers. We had extremely cold weather this winter -16 temperatures but it seems just fine and his budding now. Thanks in advance for any insight on the continued blooming question!
Hi Marla, Glad to hear the cuttings develop so easily! I haven’t tried to take cuttings from them, and perhaps I should! 🙂 Lavender Phenomenal is a long-blooming Lavender variety, so it should bloom non-stop once it gets going. When you say yours doesn’t bloom all Summer, what exactly does it do? For me, the bloom time is very long, then around August the flowers begin to slowly dry on the stems, but still look wonderful well into the Fall season. You can cut the flowers off to possibly get another flush of blooms later in the season. Many people do this when they want to dry the flowers on their stems — hanging them upside down, etc. BUT — Lavender isn’t like other plants that you deadhead during the season, for example like Salvia. Lavender has one long blooming season, and more flowers just keep coming. Even when I did prune mine in the Fall, there were still a handful of new flowers popping up!
I agree it is great in hot and humid areas, and carefree — which we love, right? 🙂 I’m afraid to suggest cutting it back during the blooming season, as I know I have success just letting them flower constantly on their own all season. However, if you wanted to experiment, perhaps cut a small ‘section’ of the plant back to see what it does. Or cut back one plant after flowering and leave the others to compare. Lavender Phenomenal should just keep blooming all Summer, so it is possible you might not have this exact variety — there are so many that I think are hard to tell apart actually. I hope this helps! Keep me posted too!
I cannot grow lavender in my area , live in Tx so , I will try phenomenal.Thanks for your tips !🌸
You’re welcome Celia, and I really hope this variety of lavender works for you in Texas! Please keep me posted!
I found your site while looking for a lavender that would survive humid Memphis. Wanted to let you know that the bug in the picture with the “bee” in it isn’t a bumblebee! It’s called a robber fly and it EATS bees. I found them in my yard for the first time this year. They also chow down on beetles and grasshoppers so are good predators to have in your garden. This type is Laphria thoracica and you can recognize it by the yellow ring around the black spot on its back. It has a really loud buzz when it flies too. It’s a good picture of the little guy though! They aren’t that common. I read that if a female, it lays eggs in the ground and the larvae eat grubs and other bugs underground until it pupates.
Wow Claire — thank you SO much for properly (and correctly!) identifying this bee, which is something I’ve never heard of: a robber fly! I really appreciate the info you’ve shared here. I wish my Lavender was still in bloom so I could go out and find one and get familiar with identifying it! Glad to know it’s a good guy, but not happy that it eats bees?!?
Hi Laura,
I’ve been gardening for decades, and this year is the first time I’ve seen a robber fly. I researched it this summer because it didn’t behave like a bumblebee though it looked like one. The first time I spotted it, it was nestled on the ground among the dead iris leaves I was removing. It was big for a bug, so I gave it a wide berth. Later I saw another, or maybe the same one, sunning itself on the bricks of my raised garden. It seemed to have no interest in the lavender or basil flowers, and was not “busy” at all.
Robber flies are over an inch long, and have a very loud buzz in flight like you can imagine a regular fly of that size might. It IS a shame they kill bees, but they still are beneficial insects like praying mantises are. One of the sites I read said that if you have one, it’s a sign that you have a healthy insect population on your grounds. Robber flies are predators and don’t eat nectar. Your image has the bug not engaged with a flower, and it has the two giant eyes that robber flies have. But maybe it IS a bee after all. I went back to look at robber fly pictures again today, and the fly is a lot hairier around its face than yours appears to be. Take a look here, and maybe you can compare it to what’s in your garden. Insect site: http://www.cirrusimage.com/fly_robber_Laphria_thoracica.htm. There’s a lot of info there.
This is fascinating, because now I remember someone years ago looking at my Lavender covered with “bees” and noting there were Carpenter Bees included. So I just looked up images of Carpenter bees and that’s what this looks like. It’s got the back hairy legs and the back body that looks like there are ridges in it. Hmmm…. But those Robber Fly images also make a great case too!
When I captured that bee it was in flight, so that’s why it looks like it isn’t enjoying a flower. But maybe take a look at my “Lavender Phenomenal” video on my YouTube Channel — there’s a link you can get to from the menu at the top: VIDEOS. I show the bees on the lavender as I discuss the plants, so maybe that will give you a better look.(It’s a different video than the one included in the article above.) I just re-watched it myself and am thinking they are Carpenter Bees, because they are taking advantage — or appear to be — of the flowers. Let me know what you think! (And thanks again — this is really interesting to me!)