Nepeta (catmint) is another plant I don’t grow at home. I love how it looks, but I’m not a fan of how it smells – and smell is a key factor with a highly scented plant you’ll be spending a lot of time pushing past and through, getting all those volatile oils with their pungent compounds airborne.
There are, of course, compact varieties that you could plant to avoid this scenario, but I’m not sure I can see the point of them. The joy of a big nepeta – something like ‘Six Hills Giant’, for example – is the profusion of wafty stems and clouds of lavender-coloured flowers, on a shrub that’s far more amenable on a heavy, sometimes soggy soil than lavender itself. They’re distant cousins, both in the minty/nettle family (Lamiaceae) and, while lavender’s technically evergreen it, like nepeta, is mostly winter dormant here in the UK. Of the two, nepeta seems to possess more of a mint-like lust for life, is less prone to sulk in the winter wet (even while enjoying a hibernal nap), and will take better to heavier, richer soils. I think I’ll just have to hold my nose and succumb to the inevitable.
More plants that have yet to make it into (or survive) this garden…
A prickle: pulmonaria
This, being more in the way of a needle than a prickle, could be taken as a howl of frustration over those plants it seems that everyone else can grow but I, somewhat inexplicably, can’t. A very short, by no means exhaustive list: eucalyptus. Magnolia. And, the subject of this post, pulmonaria.
A prickle: the crucifixion thorn
The twig ident is a wondrous event, with which those of us who’ve had the good fortune to have studied horticulture at some point in our lives will be well acquainted. A subset of the plant ident, for …