How to use lavender: from garden to kitchen, health, and beyond

Most of what you can do with lavender starts with dried buds, and most people harvest them at the wrong time. Cut too late and the flowers shatter and the scent is thin. Cut at the right moment and one plant supplies a year of tea, cooking and sachets.

This guide covers harvesting and drying first, then what to do with the result. If you are still getting the plant established, see growing lavender indoors and caring for indoor lavender.

Harvesting and drying lavender

Cut the stems when the buds have colored up but before the individual flowers open.^[1] Oil content peaks at that point and drops once the flowers are fully out. In practice this is a window of a few days.

Harvest in the morning, once the dew has dried and before the day’s heat. Cut whole stems well down into the green growth, taking no more than a third of the plant at a time, and avoid cutting into the woody base.

To dry, bundle 30 to 50 stems, tie the bundle at the cut ends, and hang it upside down somewhere dark and airy. Darkness matters: light bleaches the color out. Two to three weeks is usually enough, and the buds are ready when they strip off the stem with a light pinch.

Store the stripped buds in an airtight jar away from light. They hold their scent for about a year, after which they are still fine for sachets but not worth cooking with.

Cooking with lavender

The single rule is restraint. Lavender is closer to a spice than a herb in strength, and the line between fragrant and perfumed is roughly a teaspoon. Start with about a third of the quantity you would use of rosemary and adjust upward across several attempts.

Grind or chop the buds before adding them to a batter or dough. Whole buds stay whole through baking and give an unpleasant floral pop rather than an even flavor.

It pairs best with honey, lemon, blueberry and dark chocolate on the sweet side, and with lamb, roast chicken and rosemary on the savory side. Lavender shortbread, lavender-honey ice cream and lavender lemonade are the three things most people make first, and all three work.

Two easy preparations worth having in the cupboard:

Lavender sugar. Bury a tablespoon of dried buds in a cup of caster sugar in a sealed jar for two weeks, then sift the buds out. Use it in shortbread, sprinkled on scones, or to sweeten tea.

Lavender simple syrup. Simmer equal parts sugar and water with a tablespoon of buds for five minutes, take it off the heat, steep for 20 minutes, then strain. This is the base for lavender lemonade and for iced tea, and it keeps for a month in the fridge.

Lavender tea

Use one teaspoon of dried buds per cup and steep for five minutes in water just off the boil. Longer steeping pulls out a bitterness that no amount of honey covers.

Lavender on its own is strong for most palates. It sits better blended, and chamomile, lemon balm and mint all work well with it at roughly one part lavender to three parts of the other herb.

Fresh buds work too, at about twice the quantity, since they carry water weight.

Infused oil and essential oil

These are two different products and the difference matters.

Infused oil is what you can make at home. You are steeping dried lavender in a carrier oil, and the result is a mildly scented oil suitable for massage, skin care and cooking. Fill a jar with dried buds, cover them completely with a neutral carrier such as almond, jojoba or light olive oil, seal it, and leave it somewhere warm for three to four weeks, shaking it every few days. Strain through muslin and store in a dark glass bottle.

Use dried buds only. Fresh lavender carries water into the oil and the batch will grow mold.

Essential oil cannot be made this way. It requires steam distillation, which concentrates the plant’s volatile compounds, principally linalool and linalyl acetate, into something roughly a hundred times stronger than an infusion. Recipes that describe a jar on a windowsill as “making essential oil” are describing an infusion.

For a bottled essential oil, Plant Therapy’s pure, undiluted lavender essential oil is a reliable option. Always dilute it in a carrier before it touches skin, at around 2%, or 12 drops per ounce.

Lavender and sleep

Lavender has better evidence behind it for sleep and anxiety than for any of its other traditional uses, though the picture is not uniform.

Inhaled lavender oil has been studied for sleep quality in hospital and care settings, and several trials report modest improvements in how quickly people fall asleep and how rested they report feeling. Effects are small and the studies are mostly small and short. An oral standardized preparation, sold as Silexan, has more substantial trial evidence for generalized anxiety.

For household use, the practical options are a diffuser run for 30 to 60 minutes before bed, a pillow spray made from a few drops of oil shaken into water, or a sachet of dried buds inside the pillowcase. The Urpower 2nd Gen Aroma Essential Oil Diffuser covers a bedroom-sized room and is inexpensive.

Treat this as a pleasant addition to a bedtime routine rather than a treatment for insomnia. If sleep is a persistent problem, that is a conversation for a doctor.

Skin and hair

Lavender oil is antimicrobial in laboratory testing, and linalool is active against a range of bacteria and fungi in vitro. How much of that survives dilution on human skin is less clear, and the everyday claims about acne, eczema and hair growth rest on much thinner evidence than the sleep research does.

What it is genuinely good for is scent and mildness. Diluted lavender oil or lavender-infused oil makes a decent massage oil, bath oil and pre-shampoo scalp treatment, and it is well tolerated by most people.

Patch test before using it more widely. Lavender is a recognized cause of allergic contact dermatitis, and reactions are more common than its gentle reputation suggests. Apply a diluted drop to the inside of the forearm and leave it 24 hours.

Sachets, potpourri and moth repellent

Dried lavender keeps its scent longer than most flowers, which is why it ends up in drawers and wardrobes.

Fill small muslin or cotton bags with dried buds and tuck them into drawers, suitcases and coat pockets. Squeeze them every few weeks to break the buds and release more scent, and expect a year or so of useful life before you refill them.

The moth-repellent reputation is real but limited. Lavender deters clothes moths from laying in treated fabric, which is worth having, and it does nothing to eggs or larvae already present. Clean the wardrobe out first, then use the sachets to keep it that way.

For potpourri, mix the buds with dried rose petals, orange peel and a fixative such as orris root, which holds the volatile scent compounds and roughly doubles how long the mix lasts.

Safety

Lavender is well tolerated by most people in the quantities used for cooking and household scent. A few things are worth knowing.

Allergic contact dermatitis is the most common problem, and a patch test handles it. Essential oil should never be swallowed. It is far more concentrated than anything you would cook with, and ingestion causes nausea and, at higher doses, worse.

There are case reports linking repeated topical use of lavender-containing products to breast tissue development in prepubertal boys. The evidence is contested and the number of cases is small, but it is a reason to keep undiluted essential oil off children’s skin.

If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, or taking sedatives or blood thinners, check with a doctor before using lavender oil medicinally rather than as a scent. Culinary quantities are not the concern here; concentrated oil is.

References

1. Michigan State University Extension, “Lavender: a beautiful and useful herb.” https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/lavender_a_beautiful_and_useful_herb ↩︎

2. University of Maryland Extension, “Lavender.” https://extension.umd.edu/resource/lavender ↩︎