Woolly lavender

Lavandula lanata, commonly known as woolly lavender, is a compact aromatic evergreen subshrub in the family Lamiaceae endemic to the limestone mountains of southern Spain, particularly the Sierra Nevada, the Sierras de Cazorla and Segura and adjacent ranges of Andalucía, where it grows in open rocky garrigue and pine woodlands at 1000 to 2000 metres elevation. Plants form rounded bushy mounds 40 to 80 centimetres tall and as wide, with stout, much-branched woody bases bearing erect leafy non-flowering shoots. The species is distinguished within its genus by the dense, soft, snow-white woolly tomentum that thickly clothes the stems and both surfaces of the leaves and gives the whole plant a striking silvery-white appearance. Leaves are opposite, narrowly oblanceolate to linear-spatulate, 3 to 5 centimetres long and 4 to 8 millimetres wide, with entire and slightly revolute margins. The flowering spikes are slender, unbranched and 5 to 12 centimetres long, borne on long naked peduncles 15 to 30 centimetres tall well above the foliage; the spike consists of dense whorls of small two-lipped intensely fragrant deep violet-purple flowers subtended by small ovate bracts.