Clinopodium coccineum 'Amber Blush'

‘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.

The 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.

‘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.

Give ‘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.

Photo courtesy of Juniper Level Botanic Gardens.

Learn more about the Clinopodium genus with our guide.