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Peppery mints.

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There's peppermints, and there's other pepperminty mints.

I've lots of mints and similar in my garden. It's so bad that a neighbor asked once, seeing me come home with yet another bagful of plants: "Ah, more mints?"
And that's not mints as in the mint family, but mints as in Mentha sp. and other scented edible Lamiaceae family plants.

Two of the almost mints I grow have the taste of peppermint, but they're better: they're sweet, too. One of them is an early summer flowerer, showy calamint (Calamintha grandiflora). It's small and has been suffering from shade this year, but mmm, the scent, and the taste. The flowers are very showy: bright pink and almost 3 cm (1") long.

The other is mountainmint, of which I've grown two: whorled mountain mint (Pycnanthemum verticillatum) and narrow-leaved mountain mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium).
They flower in late summer or early autumn and differ in form: they're easy to tell apart if grown side by side. But tell them apart by taste? Not possible, at least not to my palate, so they end up in the same dried herb jar.

Yum for these pepperminty non-Mentha mints!

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Related entry: The peppermints