12/27/2023 0 Comments Short toothed mountain mintThe 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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