California Mountain Mint Seeds (Pycnanthemum californicum)

Our western answer to the more well known Pycnanthemum species of eastern prairies – a supreme pollinator magnet – deeply, lushly fragrant and soft-leaved – occuring from mid-elevation mountains in the California-Oregon borderlands southward to Baja.

Members of this genus attract pollinators in scores. All types. Butterflies and hoverflies, bees of every shape and size, and innumerable interesting solitary wasps. Together these legions show up in grand parties (along with crab spiders who await their arrival).

Moreover, look upon the small teeming crowds of tiny foliage dwellers…the thrips…and those that feed upon them…ladybird beetles and lacewings. A single plant is an interesting and lively insect city.

Tea from the sweet-minty leaves? Yes.

Only capable of growing in the mountain zones? Nope. You might plant this in the San Francisco Tenderloin, or next to a sidewalk in Old Town Tacoma, where the ghosts of our Japanese pioneer ancestors walk. It’s adaptable as a garden specimen outside of its strictly wild home ground, and never ever invasive. The yellow-faced bumble bee and woodland skipper butterfly will immediately recognize it, whether in Vancouver or San Diego.

It definitely enjoys a little damp ground and any streambank analog will do: a dripping garden faucet, the dampness beneath a birdbath, the bioswale at your office building where you scatter seeds without permission. Try cold stratification to make the tiny seeds germinate. California mountain mint is a perennial that can achieve heights upwards of about two and a half feet tall, producing white-lavender flowers with a multi-stemmed growth habit.

Oh…it also flowers in mid-summer, after the spring wildflowers have gone to sleep.

Impeccable. In every way.

50+ tiny seeds (0.01 grams).