The mint family at its most understated and most useful. Low, aromatic subshrubs of Southern sandhills, the calamints bloom late when pollinators are hungry, and stay deer-resistant and drought-tough once settled.
‘Amber Blush’ is a soft-toned selection of the native scarlet calamint, Clinopodium coccineum, an aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family from the deep sands of the southeastern coastal plain. Where the wild species flowers in hot scarlet, this clone brings a gentler and more complicated color to the same tough, hummingbird-visited plant: bright yellow washed with orange, deepening toward amber.
'Desi Arnez' (Clinopodium georgianum hybrid) turned up as a chance seedling in the garden of Robert Mackintosh, a cross of uncertain parentage that Woodlanders judged worth keeping and worth introducing. The likeliest account is a quiet romance between Georgia savory (Clinopodium georgianum) and a neighboring false rosemary (Conradina), two southeastern natives that seldom bother to cross the line between their genera. Botanists who keep their Latin tidy now file the result under the bigeneric name ×Clinadina, which is roughly how the field admits it never saw the match coming.
Clinopodium coccineum is a small, aromatic, semi-evergreen subshrub of the mint family, native to the deep, well-drained sands of the southeastern coastal plain from Mississippi and Georgia down into Florida. The loose, open frame and small, spicy-scented leaves would earn a quiet place on their own, but the flowers are the event: scarlet tubes an inch or two long, held out like little trumpets. Bloom comes heaviest in spring and again in fall, with scattered flowers through the summer between, and in the mildest gardens of zones 8 and 9 the plant will open something in almost any month the weather stays soft.
Clinopodium coccineum ‘Ohoopee Yellow’ wears a contradictory name, since this is a clear, bright yellow-flowered form of a mint shrub that usually blooms in scarlet. Yellow forms turn up rarely in wild populations, and the floras note them in passing as a curiosity. This one was caught and kept.
Clinopodium georgianum is a low, aromatic shrublet of the mint family, grown for strongly scented foliage and clouds of soft pinkish-lavender flowers from late summer into fall, peaking around September when much of the garden is winding down. Where the scarlet calamint is a hummingbird firework, Georgia savory is the quiet one: smaller flowers, softer color, and a season that arrives when the bees have run short of options. Crushed, the leaves smell frankly minty, with a sweet edge that one nurseryman has compared to expensive peppermint candy.
Large-flowered scarlet calamint is a small, wiry, semi-evergreen subshrub of the Florida sandhills, close kin to the better-known red basil, Clinopodium coccineum, and distinguished chiefly by the size of the flowers. Slender scarlet tubes, generously long, open along the stems from spring through summer and are built precisely for hummingbirds, which find them quickly and come back. The leaves are small, neat and aromatic, throwing a clean mint scent when brushed, and the whole plant stays open and airy rather than dense, better placed at the front of a bed than in the middle of it.
