In season

Want undemanding beauties that give gorgeous summer colour and scent? Look to the mint family, says Neil Ross. Each ornamental mint has its own unique scent, from lemon and rose to spicy liquorice, so place them where they get tousled and brushed as you

Why Neil Ross’ summer garden must have salvias, nepeta and agastache.

Whether it’s cornflakes or digestives, I’m a sucker at the shops for any pack which boasts to be offering 50 per cent extra for free. In the garden, I’m similarly on the hunt for extras, especially in the holiday season when we should spend most of our time actually enjoying our plants rather than tending and tweaking them. So premium summer flowers have to pump out the colour for months as standard, preferably without much deadheading. If they attract busy pollinators and are drought resistant, so much the better. But would it seem greedy to expect scent as well in this premium package? Look into the mint family of plants and you really can have it all.

Lamiaceae is typified by aromatic beauties. Kate Jury from Seaflowers Nursery points out that each variety has its own unique scent, from lemon and rose to spicy liquorice, so it’s worth placing them where they get tousled and brushed as you pass. Other features of the mints are opposite leaves, square stems and flowers composed of fused petals making an upper and lower lip.

In salvias, this flowery pout is craftily designed to “kiss” unsuspecting visiting insects so pollen is stamped onto their bodies and thus couriered via airmail to the surrounding plants. Each species has a bespoke design tailored to its particular visiting insect, so it’s no surprise that the old name for the family, Labiatae, was derived from the Latin word for lips.

Mints are a huge and diverse tribe which includes thyme, basil, oregano, hyssop and balm (Melissa) as well as more shrubby lavender, rosemary and sage. Often their flowers are small but bunched into spikes, or clustered in whorls that are best seen to dramatic effect in ornamental phlomis species such as Jerusalem sage, and most extravagantly in the ruffled crowns of colourful bergamots (the Monarda genus) which provide us with so many worthwhile garden plants.

Because mints are so soft and subtle, they can easily

be overlooked in the rush for more architectural plants, but where would we be, for example, without catmint to soften our borders and edges?

Look at any gardening book, and alongside the roses and box hedges of summer, you will always see a ruff of the misty sky blue of Nepeta ‘Six Hill Giant’, a colour that harmonises so well with every other. Moreover, brush past it and you never forget that minty scent; certainly any cats in the vicinity won’t either as they are set on a high by the sniff of the powerfully narcotic nepetalactone released when the foliage is crushed. Some 60 to 80 per cent of cats are genetically programmed to respond to this minty opium, and I’ve had many a special catmint pulverised by the rump of a rapturous feline. So with new plants, it pays to press holly or berberis twigs in the earth around them to discourage the revelry. The great bonus with catmint is that once it has had its first long flush of blue, you can politely brush the bees aside in high summer and trim it lightly or cut down the whole plant to the ground, and new flowers and leaves will rise resplendent for an autumnal encore.

Keep a look out for the many exciting dwarf varieties, many based on the diminutive and less hardy Nepeta x faassenii or the stately deep blue of the magnificent Nepeta sibirica and Nepeta subsessilis which make more upright subjects for further back in the border. Least “catmint-y” of all is Nepeta govaniana with pale lemon flowers and an airy disposition.

Very similar to the catmints are the Calamintha which are slightly smaller and more delicate though no less impressive for their long, easy display beside a path edge. Colours can range from mauve to white – all held in a gauzy cloud which can be very beautiful catching late summer rays.

For a more daring mix of hues, consider the giant hyssops, the Agastache. These mints are more upright than catmint and come in a wider range of colours. The genus includes two distinct tribes, the hardier types from colder parts of Asia and America with dense flower spikes in blue and white which make lovely seedheads in the winter garden and rarely need staking. This group includes the reliable Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’, Agastache foeniculum and Korean mint Agastache rugosa, but then for milder gardens there are species from Mexico and California with gentler habits.

These exotic, shorter-lived, slightly shrubby plants need good drainage and come in an exciting blend of oranges, including apricot and even red. They look beautiful amidst rocks and succulents in contemporary gardens. It’s just a pity that we can’t also enjoy the hummingbirds which the plants’ tubular clusters of flowers have evolved to entice in their native lands. ✤