It looks at home paired with the silver foliage of Lamb’s Ear ( Stachys lanata) and it is great at brightening the darker foliage of deep purple leaved plants like Purple Leaved Smoketree (such as Cotinus coggygria ‘Velvet Cloak’). Mountain Mint is a great plant for working into the Garden. This aroma is also effective at eliminating deer browse! Tightly clad to the square stems by only a short petiole, the foliage contains pulegone, an oil with an aroma reminiscent of spearmint that is very effective at repelling mosquitoes when rubbed on the skin. The lance-shaped, dark green foliage, measures 2–2 ½ inches long and much like a typical mint, the foliage is very aromatic when rubbed. ![]() My interest in this plant grew even further! Zoom in Photo 2: The vertical nature of Pycnanthemum muticum. Come winter, the clusters of dried seed capsules atop the stems have a nice winter presence, especially with a heavy December frost (Photo 4). The flowers open over a 3 month period beginning in June and are a great source of nectar for bees, beneficial wasps, moths and butterflies! In fact, it is rare that the plants are not a flurry of activity when in bloom. It is this dense arrangement of flowers that sparked the crafting of the two initial genus names. ![]() For Pycnanthemum, they provide a beautiful ornamental effect for over 3 months! The flowers themselves are roughly ⅛" long, white with pink markings and are densely arranged in a ½" diameter compressed flower structure called a cyme. Much like Poinsettias and our native Flowering Dogwood, the actual flowers are very small and the primary impact is created by these bracts. The shimmering, silvery effect of the plant was not the result of a true flower petal, but rather a pair of silver colored bracts or modified leaves that subtend the terminal boss of small white to light pink flowers, as seen in Photo 1. A weed suppressing, non-invasive mint-my interest in this plant began to grow! Naturally, I thought it was another invasive mint and was about to dismiss the plant when he noted it was merely a dense, ‘weed-suppressing’ plant and not invasive. The gentleman leading the tour mentioned how these masses of Mountain Mint had been installed in an effort to reduce weeds. Although the day was cloudy and it was mostly growing beneath a canopy of tall trees, the plant gave the impression of sunlight cutting through openings in the branches and illuminating the forest floor beneath. It appeared periodically throughout the park as a 2–3' tall mass of shimmering silver along the edge of woodlands and ponds. Personally, I was not introduced to this plant until 2010 while touring Central Park. Zoom in Photo 1: Silver colored bracts of Pycnanthemum muticum. Although the common name is Mountain Mint, it actually does not grow in alpine regions, but rather in open, moist fields and forest edges, often located along the lower elevations of a mountain. The species epithet comes from the Latin Muticus for blunt, perhaps a reference to the dome-shaped or blunt appearance of the apical flowers. It only took a few years for the French botanist and mycologist Christiaan Hendrik Persoon (1761–1836) to assign the proper genus name in 1806. Interestingly, in the same book he described a new genus named Pycnanthemum! Both names are from the Greek to describe the flower structure Brachys means short and Stelma means column while Pyknos means dense and Anthos means flower. ![]() It was initially brought to the attention of European botanists by the French botanist Andre Michaux (1746–1802) in 1790, when he found masses of the plant growing in Pennsylvania! Michaux initially named and described the plant as Brachystemum muticum, which was published posthumously in 1803 in his work Flora Boreali-Americana. Mountain Mint is certainly not a new plant to the world of horticulture. Mountain Mint, botanically known as Pycnanthemum muticum, is one such member of the Lamiaceae and it defies my imagination as to why this plant is not more popular among gardeners. However, there are other plants in the mint family or Lamiaceae that display a far greater degree of garden refinement and manners. ![]() Typically, our first thought is of a plant with wonderfully fragrant foliage that happens to combine well with Ice Tea and Mint Juleps! Unfortunately, this is matched with an equally unsettling vision of a plant that knows no boundaries and will rapidly spread throughout your garden! True mints are found within the genus Mentha, and their aggressively spreading nature makes them problematic in an ornamental garden. Mint is a plant that conjures up a multitude of thoughts and emotions among gardeners.
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