help id mint?

[Joe]

Can anyone help identify this mint? It grows 4 to 5 feet high, the largest leaves are 3 inches long, the stems and leaves are a little hairy. It has a good taste for making mint tea, and best of all, doesn't spread aggressively like other mints that I have. This mint was here when I moved in, and I suspect it's been here a long time and it's still a small patch:

[Pat Meadows]

(Melissa officinalis) to me. My lemon balm did not spread aggressively.

Does it have a lemony smell when you crush a leaf?

Pat

[Joe]

I have time naming smells sometimes, but it's not lemony. Peppermint is the closest I can describe it, but I don't think that's right either.

[Henriette Kress]

a real spreader. Not that I have anything against spreading mints in general, I have about 10 "real" mints (Mentha spp.), but this particular one takes over the peppermint patch and doesn't taste very good. So this year I've just ripped up every applemint I've seen pop up, in my garden. Catpiss is quite a good description of both taste and scent. It's a species, therefore easily grown from seeds.

the leaves were narrower it could be Moroccan mint, Mentha spicata var. crispa cv., which is very good in ice tea indeed. That doesn't spread as much and has a nice sweetish spearminty taste - and the flowers are in small (less than 1 cm in diameter), distinct white balls on their flowerstems. It's a hybrid, doesn't grow from seeds (or well, it might make seeds, but they won't give you moroccan mint), so it has to be planted from runners.

course, mints hybridize freely, so you could have something else again.

Henriette

[Pat Meadows]

I think not lemon balm then, it has a very distinct lemony smell.

Pat