{"title":"The Scrub Mints","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe small aromatic shrubs of the Southeastern sandhills and the Florida scrub: calamints, false rosemaries and wild pennyroyal, most of them on white sand, several of them rare. They ask for full sun, fast drainage and no kindness in the form of compost, and they pay in scent. Woodlanders has been growing this group since the 1980s.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCumberland rosemary is federally threatened and can be sold inside South Carolina only. Our field guide to the scrub mints covers every species we grow or have grown, and which one belongs in your ground.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"clinopodium-georgianum-hybrid-desi-arnez","title":"Clinopodium georgianum hybrid 'Desi Arnez'","description":"\u003cp\u003e'Desi Arnez' (\u003cem\u003eClinopodium georgianum\u003c\/em\u003e 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 (\u003cem\u003eClinopodium georgianum\u003c\/em\u003e) and a neighboring false rosemary (\u003cem\u003eConradina\u003c\/em\u003e), 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 ×\u003cem\u003eClinadina\u003c\/em\u003e, which is roughly how the field admits it never saw the match coming.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe plant wears narrow, aromatic, evergreen leaves close along upright woody stems, greener and a shade broader than true Conradina, crushing to clean peppermint as you pass. The habit is improbably tidy for a foundling, holding a neat eighteen inches or so without being asked. In fall, soft pink flowers open the length of the stems.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey want fast-draining soil and a spot in sun to light shade. Like both parents they shrug off drought, but they forgive a wetter winter than most Conradina will sit through, which is part of why this one travels so easily from the sandhills into an ordinary garden bed.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGail Barton of Flowerplace Plant Farm in Mississippi did the work of making him known. Her husband, Richard Lowery, did the work of making him memorable, naming the plant for Desi Arnaz, one half of the most magnetic and improbable partnership in American television. A seedling born of two genera could hardly have asked for a better namesake, even with the spelling quietly rearranged somewhere along the way.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBrush past them on the way to somewhere else and the whole border goes to mint. That, more than the flowers, is why this one keeps ending up planted beside the path.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto courtesy of Karl Gercens III\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/clinopodium-the-soft-power-of-the-mint-family\"\u003eLearn more about the Clinopodium genus with our guide.\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057843572851,"sku":"CLIN-GEOR-DESI-ARNE-01G","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/DesiArnezCalamint.png?v=1722700598"},{"product_id":"clinopodium-georgianum","title":"Clinopodium georgianum","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eClinopodium georgianum\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe name has been unsettled for a century and is unsettled still. Roland McMillan Harper described the plant as \u003cem\u003eClinopodium georgianum\u003c\/em\u003e, for the state, and that is the name the Flora of the Southeastern United States and NatureServe both use. Kew and ITIS now sink the species into \u003cem\u003eClinopodium carolinianum\u003c\/em\u003e, a Miller name from 1768 that has priority if the two are one plant, and North Carolina State Extension has followed. We keep \u003cem\u003egeorgianum\u003c\/em\u003e, because that is the name the regional flora uses and the name our customers search, and we mention the argument because a rare-plant gardener would rather know. The three common names tell the same story from the other end: savory, basil and calamint all attach to this one shrublet precisely because the genus has been shuffled between \u003cem\u003eSatureja\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eCalamintha\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eClinopodium\u003c\/em\u003e for two hundred years.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGeorgia savory belongs to longleaf pine sandhills and dry, thin-soiled woodlands from the Carolinas through Georgia and west along the Gulf, and turns up on granite outcrop margins in the Georgia Piedmont as well. Globally the species is secure, but the northern edge is another matter: North Carolina lists the plant State Endangered, and the identified threat is fire suppression, the same quiet loss that has emptied so much of the longleaf understory. Growing a nursery-propagated plant is a small thing, but it keeps the species in gardens while the fire question is worked out. Unlike most of the tribe, this southern native will take heavier soils as well as sand.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSite Georgia savory where the aromatic foliage can be brushed in passing: along a path, at the front of a sunny border, in a rock or gravel garden, or drifted through a naturalized native planting. Full sun to part shade, well-drained ground, tough and drought-tolerant once established, and easily kept neat with a shear after flowering. Pair with little bluestem, asters and goldenrod, which share both the lean ground and the late season, and let the whole planting come to a head in September.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/clinopodium-the-soft-power-of-the-mint-family\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eLearn more about the Clinopodium genus with our guide.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057845014643,"sku":"CLIN-GEOR-01G","price":27.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/IMG_6411.jpg?v=1775094055"},{"product_id":"clinopodium-coccineum","title":"Clinopodium coccineum","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eClinopodium coccineum\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFew plants have been shuffled between genera as often as this one. Nuttall’s material was published as a \u003cem\u003eCunila\u003c\/em\u003e in 1825, and over the following century the species passed through \u003cem\u003eMelissa\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eGardoquia\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eCalamintha\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eSatureja\u003c\/em\u003e before Kuntze settled the present combination in 1891. The fault was never with the plant. The characters that were supposed to separate those genera, calyx shape and leaf form and geography, grade into one another, and molecular work has since confirmed that the old boundaries do not hold. \u003cem\u003eClinopodium\u003c\/em\u003e itself is a homely name, from the Greek for a bed and a little foot, a bedpost, for the shape of the flower clusters in the European type species. Woodlanders introduced the southern clinopodiums to gardeners in the 1980s and went on using that name straight through the decades when the authorities preferred \u003cem\u003eCalamintha\u003c\/em\u003e or \u003cem\u003eSatureja\u003c\/em\u003e. The authorities have since come round.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the wild scarlet calamint belongs to the longleaf pine sandhills and open flatwoods, with scrub and coastal dune populations at the edges, always in white sand and always in full sun. The long nectar tubes are built for hummingbirds, and both the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the Florida Wildflower Foundation name the plant a hummingbird draw; large butterflies work the flowers as well. The crushed foliage carries a clean, spicy scent that browsing deer usually pass over, though nobody should plant this or anything else on the assumption that deer read labels.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive scarlet calamint full sun and fast-draining sand, and site the shrub where the flowers and the hummingbird traffic can be watched up close: a hot bank, a gravel or xeric border, a rock garden, the front of a sunny native bed. Pair with salvias, little bluestem and other plants that ask for the same lean, dry ground, and run the planting along a path where brushing past releases the scent. One honest caution comes with the toughness. Scarlet calamint can be slow to settle and will not forgive wet feet while establishing, and then asks for very little for the rest of a long life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto credit to Jonas Meyer.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/news\/clinopodium-the-soft-power-of-the-mint-family\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eLearn more about the Clinopodium genus with our guide.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057845145715,"sku":"CLIN-COCC-01G","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/5C746564-9851-451B-A8A2-96F63DB56889.jpg?v=1782135232"},{"product_id":"clinopodium-coccineum-amber-blush","title":"Clinopodium coccineum 'Amber Blush'","description":"\u003cp\u003e‘Amber Blush’ is a soft-toned selection of the native scarlet calamint, \u003cem\u003eClinopodium coccineum\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe plant was found along the Weaver River in Santa Rosa County, in the Florida Panhandle, by Fred Spicer, Rick Lewandowski and Ron Miller, and introduced by Plant Delights Nursery in 2012. Our stock came to us from Rick Lewandowski, of Shangri La Botanical Gardens in Orange, Texas, one of the three who found the plant. Yellow-flowered forms of scarlet calamint turn up occasionally in the wild across the range, which is how both this selection and our Georgia clone ‘Ohoopee Yellow’ came to exist at all.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e‘Amber Blush’ is close kin to ‘Ohoopee Yellow’, and the two are worth telling apart. The Georgia plant is a clear, bright yellow; this one runs deeper and warmer, and the dark green foliage is a little denser. In our beds the flowers take on an orangey pink cast as cool fall weather arrives, so a single plant can move through a whole range of warm tones across a season. That last is our own observation rather than anything published, and we pass it on as such.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive ‘Amber Blush’ full sun and sharp, well-drained sand, and site the subshrub where the long season of bloom and the hummingbird traffic can be enjoyed up close: a hot bank, a gravel or xeric border, a rock garden, the front of a sunny native bed. The aromatic foliage is one deer usually pass over, and rewards a brush of the hand along a path. Pair with salvias, grasses and other plants content on lean, dry ground. Expect a slow first season and very little asked of you after that.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto courtesy of Juniper Level Botanic Gardens.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/news\/clinopodium-the-soft-power-of-the-mint-family\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eLearn more about the Clinopodium genus with our guide.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057845178483,"sku":"CLIN-COCC-AMBE-BLUS-01G","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Clinopodiumcoccineum_AmberBlush.png?v=1722700003"},{"product_id":"clinopodium-satureja-calamintha-coccineum-ohoopee-yellow","title":"Clinopodium coccineum ‘Ohoopee Yellow’","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eClinopodium coccineum\u003c\/em\u003e ‘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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe yellow form was originally shared with us by Ken Wurdak, who found the plant in Tattnall County, Georgia. We later lost our stock and got the clone back from Mike Creel, who had received starts from us years before. Such are plant sagas. Tattnall County sits in the Ohoopee dune country, a band of deep white sand blown up along the Ohoopee River that carries one of the strangest floras in Georgia, including the state-threatened Ohoopee wild basil, \u003cem\u003eClinopodium ashei\u003c\/em\u003e. Scarlet calamint grows on those same dunes, which is where the name comes from and why the plant is as drought-hardened as anything we sell.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA showy, long-flowering native for a sunny, sandy site, scarlet calamint grows wild across the deep sands of the southern coastal plain, flowering heaviest in spring and again in fall with scattered bloom between. Woodlanders introduced the southern clinopodiums to gardeners back in the 1980s and stubbornly went on calling them \u003cem\u003eClinopodium\u003c\/em\u003e while botanists spent a couple of decades insisting on \u003cem\u003eCalamintha\u003c\/em\u003e or \u003cem\u003eSatureja\u003c\/em\u003e. The authorities now agree that \u003cem\u003eClinopodium\u003c\/em\u003e is correct. Ah, vindication.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGive ‘Ohoopee Yellow’ full sun and fast-draining, sandy soil, and site the subshrub where the clear yellow bloom and the hummingbird traffic can be enjoyed up close: a hot bank, a gravel or xeric border, a rock garden, the front of a sunny native bed. Deer usually pass the aromatic foliage over, and the plant asks almost nothing once settled, though the first season can be slow and wet ground will kill a young plant faster than drought ever will. Pair with salvias, grasses, and other sun-and-drought lovers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto courtesy of the \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/jcra.ncsu.edu\/resources\/photographs\/details.php?serial=418358\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\"\u003eJC Raulston Arboretum\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/news\/clinopodium-the-soft-power-of-the-mint-family\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eLearn more about the Clinopodium genus with our guide.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057845440627,"sku":"CLIN-COCC-OHOO-YELL-01G","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Clinopodium_Satureja_Calamintha_coccineum_OhoopeeYellow.jpg?v=1722699561"},{"product_id":"conradina-verticillata","title":"Conradina verticillata","description":"\u003cp\u003eA small shrub of the Cumberland Plateau, found only on the flood-scoured cobble and sand bars of three river systems in eastern Tennessee and a sliver of Kentucky: the Big South Fork of the Cumberland, the Caney Fork, and the Obed. The rest of the \u003cem\u003eConradina\u003c\/em\u003e clan keeps to the sand scrub of Florida and the Gulf Coast of Alabama, sun-baked and semitropical. This species took a different path, north into the cooler uplands, and is the only member of the genus that never reached Florida at all. The cold-hardiness that came with the move is the gift to gardens farther north.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCumberland rosemary lives by disturbance. The plants grow on bars scoured by spring floods and baked dry by August, and they need that rhythm to survive. Flooding strips out the taller competition that would otherwise shade them off the bar; the drought that follows is the condition their roots are tuned to. Extended floods snap off stem fragments and carry them downstream, where they root in fresh gravel and start new colonies. This is a plant that requires the river to behave like a river. Dam the system, stabilize the banks, and the species quietly disappears.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere are other oddnesses. Cumberland rosemary is the only triploid in the genus, which makes seed set unreliable and most reproduction clonal, so what looks like a colony of separate plants is often a single sprawling individual rooting at the nodes. Pollinators moving between flowers are frequently moving pollen around one genetic plant, which is part of why recovery is measured in genetically distinct individuals rather than in stems. The genus honors Solomon White Conrad, 1779 to 1831, a Philadelphia printer, bookseller and mineralogist who ended up professor of botany at the University of Pennsylvania, and whose name attached to this small clan of southeastern mints almost by accident. The leaves, crushed, smell startlingly like culinary rosemary; a 2022 study formally characterized the odor and found eucalyptus and clove notes running under it, from 1,8-cineole and eugenol. We would rather you grew the plant than cooked with a federally threatened species.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLavender-pink flowers with darker throat spotting come in May and June, two-lipped and small but freely produced along the trailing stems. The low evergreen mat runs six to twelve inches high and spreads to two or three feet, the foliage holding through winter with a faint bronze cast in cold. Excellent in a rock garden, tumbling over a stone wall, or anywhere the conditions of the native cobble bars can be approximated: full sun, sharp drainage, acid sand or gravel, and no competition. Nursery propagation is the quiet argument for growing this one. When plants are easy to buy, there is no reason for anyone to lift a wild clump, and the Fish and Wildlife Service declined to map critical habitat at listing partly for fear of showing collectors where to look.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFederally listed as threatened since 1991, which means this plant cannot be sold across state lines. South Carolina and in-person purchase only.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhotos courtesy of Sally and Andy Wasowski.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/blogs\/the-node\/an-exploration-of-the-conradina-genus\"\u003eLearn more about the Conradina genus here\u003c\/a\u003e.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42057846161523,"sku":"CONR-VERT-01G","price":32.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/Conradina_verticilla_l7Q3C95pblex.jpg?v=1750447856"},{"product_id":"piloblephis-rigida","title":"Piloblephis rigida","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePiloblephis rigida\u003c\/em\u003e, wild or Florida pennyroyal, is a compact evergreen native mint from the sandy scrublands and pine flatwoods of Florida. The plant forms a low, tidy mound of fine, needle-like foliage that carries a clean, resinous, minty fragrance, released at a brush of the hand or on a warm afternoon in the sun.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFrom late winter into spring, earlier than most garden perennials, tight terminal clusters of small, two-lipped flowers open in soft lavender to lilac, lightly freckled with darker purple. The bloom is quiet rather than showy, but arrives when little else is flowering, and native bees and other early pollinators work the clusters steadily.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAdapted to dry, nutrient-poor ground, Florida pennyroyal wants full sun and sharp, sandy or gritty drainage, and shrugs off drought once established, but will not abide wet or heavy soil. Given those lean conditions the plant stays compact and well-behaved, a natural for native gardens, sandhill and scrub-inspired plantings, rock gardens, and sharply drained beds where restraint is the point.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe strong scent is more than pleasant. The Miccosukee and Seminole brewed the leaves into a minty tea and tucked the aromatic foliage into bedding to repel fleas, and the resinous oil has long interested those looking for a native insect repellent.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis plant came to the Woodlanders catalog through Jonas Meyer, who sourced our stock directly from Ryan Schiller's scrub-mint collection, and we are pleased to carry it forward with that clear provenance, preserving both the genetics and the regional story. A subtle but resilient native, Florida pennyroyal rewards gardeners who value plants shaped by place and are willing to meet them on their own terms.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhotos courtesy of Adam Hull and LW Ridge.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Woodlanders","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44235310465139,"sku":"PILO-RIGI-01Q","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0605\/7505\/5987\/files\/PiloblephisrigidaAdamHull.jpg?v=1768787071"}],"url":"https:\/\/woodlanders.net\/collections\/scrub-mints.oembed","provider":"Woodlanders","version":"1.0","type":"link"}