Clinopodium macrocalyx

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.

This is a genuinely rare plant, and the reason is not a mystery. The larger-flowered populations grow in longleaf pine sandhills and scrub in east-central peninsular Florida, in Seminole, Orange and Brevard counties, which is to say directly in the path of the Orlando corridor. Most of those sites have been lost to development within living memory. Growing a nursery-propagated plant of something this local is a quiet act of conservation, and it is one of the few things a gardener can actually do for a species whose habitat is being paved.

A note on the name, because the taxonomy is unsettled and we would rather say so. Some authorities now fold Clinopodium macrocalyx into C. coccineum and treat the larger flowers as variation within one species; the Flora of the Southeastern United States keeps the plant separate as large-flowered scarlet calamint. We list the name gardeners and native-plant people search for. The genus name comes from the Greek for a sloping bed, for the shape of the flower cluster in some species, and calamint traces back through Latin to the Greek kalos, beautiful, and minthe, mint. This is the mint family, Lamiaceae, and the aromatic foliage is the family signature. The related calamints have a modest folk history as tea, but we make no medicinal claim for this plant.

Give scarlet calamint what the sandhills give: full sun to light shade and sharply drained, sandy, acid soil, on the lean side. The one thing that kills the plant is wet ground, especially in winter. Use in a sandhill or scrub restoration, a pollinator planting, a gravel or xeric border, or the front of a dry sunny bed among wiregrass, coreopsis and other Florida sandhill natives. Deer generally leave the aromatic foliage alone and the plant is drought tolerant once settled. Hardy through USDA zones 8 to 9. Shear lightly after the main flush to keep the habit tidy and pull a second round of flowers.