It could be that an animal has walked through your lavender, but I suspect it is a lack of sunlight.

Lavender is a full sun loving plant. From your pictures, it looks like the part against the porch is in shade. To me, it looks like the lavender is trying to grow toward the sun and kind of falling over as it reaches.

You might consider moving it to a place with full sunlight coming from all directions.

Best,
Darcie

Darcie, my husband and I dug these plants up last week. I didn't have another garden to put them in and wasn't interested in making one.

Where they had been planted was in my front yard. It faces N/NW, so we get alot of hot sun from early afternoon until the sun sets. It is so bright that we can't even sit on the front porch during those hours. That sounds like plenty of sunlight to me, but maybe we should have planted them in a more open area(??)

Exactly how many hours of sunlight would have been required a day for these dutch lavenders?

For the future, Dutch and Provence lavender are both tall sorts (both are L x intermedia). I have Provence against a south wall, where it gets full sun about 8 hours a day, and it's still about 2 feet tall and tending to flop when in bloom. I'd say it's the nature of the beast, except when grown in lean dry soils. This spring has been wet enough to force excessive growth, which has probably added to our problem with this plant.

If you want a small tidy lavender (and such a plant would probably work in your location, as long as the soil had the proper drainage), look for a compact cultivar of L. angustifolia. See the link for DeBaggio Nursery's lavender list - it's probably the most accurate that I know of in the business. (Many if not most of the lavenders you buy at the average outlet will be misnamed, either claiming to be a clone when they're from seed, or simply with the wrong tag.)

Robin

Here is a link that might be useful: DeBaggio lavender page