The Lavender Lesson: Growth, Grief, and the Cutback We Can’t Avoid

Most of my metaphors grow in the garden.

My front yard is lavender. Spanish lavender. French lavender. Ghost lavender that catches silver in the right light. On the left side of my house, it stretches all the way up—rows of lavender and salvia in every shade of purple, layered like a living gradient.

Even my front door is lavender—a Dutch door, the one I always dreamed of. Painted soft purple to match the life I’ve built here.

So it’s not that my garden isn’t beautiful. It is. But standing in a lavender field in Washington State not long ago, I realized something I hadn’t fully admitted to myself:

I’ve been too polite with my pruning.

I’d been trimming, tidying—just enough to make things look cared for. But I hadn’t cut it back the way real gardeners do—the kind of cut that feels extreme but is actually essential for growth. I asked the farm manager, “Does it really come back like this every year? This full? This lush?”

She smiled and said, “Oh yes. We cut it all the way back—right after the bloom. Every season.”

That was my aha moment.

Because back home, my lavender had gone to seed. It was still alive—but not thriving. Some of the stems had gone woody and brittle at the base. Beautiful from a distance, but when you got close, you could see the hard, knotted bark where I’d let it go too long without a real cutback. And I thought about how that happens to people, too.

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Students Are Like Lavender

Students are like a lavender field.

Many get cut back by life itself.

Loss. Trauma. Uncertainty. Systems that fail them. Families that fall apart. Moments that change them. It’s not pretty when it happens. But when they’re nurtured after the cut—when they’re given the right soil, the right support, the right human beside them—they bloom fuller, richer, and stronger than you might expect.

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If All You Know Is Rainbows

Some students haven’t been cut back yet.

Not because of fault or failure—just because life hasn’t handed it to them. They’ve grown in systems where hardship was delayed or softened. They’ve been protected from pruning. That’s not a weakness. But it is a missing lens.

Because if all you know is rainbows, the first storm feels like the end of the world. And if you’ve never been cut back before, the first real cut feels catastrophic.

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Not Every Plant Makes It

Here’s the part I don’t love to say out loud—but it’s true:

Not every lavender plant survives the cutback. And not every student makes it through the pruning life hands them. I’ve stood beside families who have lost their children to suicide. I’ve helped hold the weight of that grief. So this isn’t a metaphor I toss around lightly. It’s not that hardship “makes you.” It’s that hardship comes.

And as educators, advocates, and human beings, our job is to help each other survive it. Sometimes that means helping students bloom after the cut. Sometimes that means making sure they aren’t cut down too far. And sometimes, it means standing in the aftermath of loss, still holding the shears, wondering if you could have done more.

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Walking Up the Hill of Hard

I spent nearly 17 years teaching classrooms full of humans—not just students. My curriculum was academic, but it was also life. In those years, I walked students through grief of every kind: Divorce. Loss. Tragedy. War. The kind of heartbreak that doesn’t get listed on a syllabus.

At JenEd®, we call it “the hill of hard.” When a student is at the bottom of that hill, sometimes their whole life feels stuck there. My job—our job—is to walk beside them. To help them see there’s a path up and over it. To remind them that the other side exists.

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The Work Ahead

Not every plant makes it through the cutback. Not every student blooms in the timeline we hope for. But when they do—when you get to witness it—it’s the most beautiful thing you’ll ever see. That’s why we keep showing up. That’s why we keep tending the field.

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According to the CDC, suicide is now the second leading cause of death for young people ages 10–24 in the United States.

We are in a youth mental health crisis—and this work matters.