Plant · P-594

Water Mint

Mentha aquatica

Water Mint is the wettest-loving of the mints, happy in standing water and grown along pond margins, bog gardens and stream edges rather than in an ordinary bed. Its fragrance is a strong, pungent peppermint that most people find too intense for cooking, so it is used more as a tea and condiment than a kitchen herb. It flowers in late summer and early autumn, a season when few other wet-edge plants are blooming, making it a strong late pollinator draw. Every fragment of rhizome roots and it runs hard through saturated ground, so it is sited where that spread is wanted - a swale bottom or pond shelf - and simply stops on its own where the soil dries out.