Introducing the Beneficial Lavender Plant
Lavender always remind me of my grandmother. She’s a woman who makes her own soaps and butter, and I swear almost everything she preserves or creates has a label that says “… and Lavender”. After a certain point I think I grew a little bit tired of the smell of lavender (it is quite strong after all) but turns out that she was using these lavender boosts for reasons I didn’t understand yet!
Lavender smells wonderful, but like so many of our plant friends out there, lavender can do wonder for our bodies and minds. I’m also so shocked to discover just how beneficial plants can be to our health, but then I remember, we live on a graciously harmonious planet.
This article is going to go through all of the fantastic benefits of having lavender around your home. Pretty soon we’ll probably all be a little bit more similar to my grandma, and using it to make candles, soaps, jams, and anything else that makes sense to put lavender in. Sausages? The french press? The options are limitless!
Are you keen on growing a lavender plant in your own home? Well, you’re in luck! Check out this article detailing all that you need to know about Growing Lavender Indoors.
A Little Bit About Lavender..
Lavandula angustifolia is a very common herb that has been around for a very long time. Part of the mint family, lavender is a native plant to the Mediterranean region and throughout India and the Middle East. It has been cultivated by humans for nearly 2500 years!
Lavender is also commonly known as the holy herb, and it has been used as a method of alternative medicine for many centuries. It was also a nifty way to help freshen up ones hair, clothes, and personal items before we had shampoo, deodorant, and air fresheners!
The lavender plant can grow happily in USDA growing zones 4 through 10, and can even be kept outdoors through the winter in those colder zones! Lavender prefers a ton of sun, not too much water, and well draining soil. After all, they’re used to desert-like conditions.
There are hundreds of different types of lavender out there, but we list 27 Different Types of Lavender for you right here.
The Benefits of Lavender Plants
1. Encourages Good Rest
One of the most common ways that lavender has traditionally helped people is by encouraging good resting, especially if you’re someone who deals with symptoms of insomnia. This is mainly because lavender fragrance encourages relaxation.
You can either use a little lavender essential oil in a diffuser, take a bath with a few drops of lavender oil in it, or you can add a couple of drops onto your pillow to help lull you into a deep and restful slumber.
2. Helps Combat Skin Blemishes and Inflammation
Lavender oil is absolutely brimming with anti inflammatories and anti oxidants. These two things are essential when it comes to dealing with things like acne, eczema, skin inflammation, sun burns, and sometimes even small wounds.
You can either put lavender oil right on your skin as long as it is diluted with a carrier oil (like olive oil or coconut oil) or, you can add a few drops of the oil to your bath and have a good soak. Either way, those anti inflammatory properties work wonders.
3. Natural Pain Remedy
If you’re not too keen on popping a Tylenol every time you have period cramps or get a headache, lavender is a wonderful natural pain remedy. Lavender oil contains those anti inflammatory properties we were just talking about, which is one of the main components of over the counter pain meds!
You can use lavender as a pain remedy in a couple of different ways. Rubbing some oil on your temples to help relieve a headache is known to work, or you can take a bath with a few drops in the water. There are also lavender supplements that can be taken for a more potent approach.
4. Aids Asthma Symptoms
Those anti inflammatories are coming in handy once more when it comes to dealing with asthma symptoms. Using a diffuser is particularly useful in this instance, if you are looking to soothe mild asthma symptoms.
5. Elevates Mood
Lavender is really powerful when it comes to mood elevation or general relaxation, and a lot of the other things that it helps with pretty much are rooted in the fact that lavender is known to help remedy anxiety, depression, headaches, and low energy.
Taking a bath with lavender, burning a lavender candle, or doing aromatherapy with lavender has been proven to help relieve symptoms of anxiety, and it in turn helps encourage feelings of relaxation calm, and acceptance.
6. Encourages Hair Growth
This one you may not have known about, but lavender is extremely good for your scalp! It has anti bacterial properties which help with things like dandruff and other scalp conditions, and the nutrients it contains helps with hair growth.
Massaging a mixture of lavender essential oil and rosemary, diluting it, and massaging it onto your scalp does a couple of things. The massaging encourages blood flow in your scalp (which it doesn’t get very much of) and the lavender oil penetrates the hair follicle.
The Ways to Use Lavender
There are several different ways that you can implement lavender in your life! And the neat thing is that you can easily make a lot of these at home remedies all by yourself.
Lavender Oil
Lavender essential is something that can easily be purchased at your local health food store, or you can always figure out how to make some of your own. It just takes a little bit of patience and time, and you’ll have a huge supply in no time.
Choose a solid carrier oil (my personal favorite is coconut oil) and spread it about an inch thick at the bottom of a container. Get some fresh lavender buds and cover the entire surface of the coconut oil in the buds.
Close the container and let it sit overnight. In the morning, remove the spent flowers and repeat the process 2 more times. By this point, the coconut oil will be infused with the wonderful fragrance of lavender.
Keep in mind that this type of lavender oil will be far less potent than the oil that is extracted right from the flowering plant. The home-made kind is great for massages, wheres the store bought stuff is more appropriate for aromatherapy and baths.
Lavender Plant
Another way to use lavender is to just have a plant in your home! This way, you can harvest the leaves and flowers as you please, and you can decide how you’d like to use them. Lavender grows best outdoors in a super sunny, hot, and dry location.
Lavender is an awesome perennial plant that brings an incredible aroma to your garden, and because of this super strong fragrance is actually helps out more vulnerable plants by deterring pesky insects that don’t like the way that it smells! Companion planting for the win!
Lavender Capsules
Lavender capsules can easily be purchased at your local health food store or online, and this lavender method is the best if you’re planning on trying out lavender to help elevate mood and as a natural pain remedy. This is because it is more potent in capsule form and also enters your system more quickly.
Lavender Tea
Lavender tea is a wonderful thing to keep around the house if you’re ever having trouble falling asleep, having feelings of anxiety, or if you are just in the mood to have an extra relaxing evening. You can buy lavender tea in all sorts of different stores, or, you can make your own!
This is where having your own plant really comes in handy. You can harvest some fresh lavender buds and place them in your favorite steeper. Then you just have to let them steep in boiled water for at least 20 minutes so that all of the goodness comes out. By this point you may have to heat up the tea again, but the effort is worth the results!
FAQs
Is lavender easy to grow?
Lavender is an incredible perennial plant that is wonderfully easy to grow as long as you can maintain its ideal growing conditions, which happen to be very easy to maintain. You can basically completely neglect these plants and they will reward you with fragrant blossoms for it.
All you have to remember is that lavender is from the Mediterranean region, which means that it prefers to have soil that is light and well draining (like sand), they need a ton of sun and heat, and they really don’t like receiving too much water or humidity.
What USDA growing zones can lavender grow in?
Lavender can happily grow outdoors all year long in USDA growing zones 4 through 10, which is rather surprising! Overwintering lavender helps it come back even stronger the following year as long as you remember to cut the plant down before the cold really sets in. Since it’s a perennial plant, it will come back vigorously once the warm spring weather returns as well.
How is lavender most commonly used?
Lavender is most commonly used for aromatherapy, as its fragrance is known to help ease feelings of anxiety, depression, and low energy, and replace those feelings with relaxation, joy, and higher energy.
At what time of year do lavender flowers bloom?
Lavender plants are wonderful because they bloom early and they bloom for a long time. A happy plant can start blooming in the early spring and sometimes last all the way through to the late summer and early fall.
