Excerpt of “Crazy for Catmints” by Rand B. Lee
Flowering in a range of cool to vibrant hues, catmints are a boon to almost any border—as long as you can keep the neighborhood felines in check.


Lately I have been suffering the overpowering urge to collect catmints. This is perhaps unfortunate, because I have, as we say in Santa Fe, bad karma where the genus Nepeta is concerned. Consider my first attempt to grow Nepeta cataria, the common catnip (Zones 3–8, 8–1). Charmed by its soft, fragrant, gray-green leaves and summer spikes of bi-lipped, white, blue-violet-spotted flowers, I bought a plant, placed it in a sun-drenched, well-drained spot at the front of my perennial border, watered it, and went indoors for about five seconds. That’s approximately how long it took for the black-and-white Persian from across the street to sense, locate, attack, and devour my catnip, lock, stock, and barrel. N. cataria is said to attain three feet tall in the wild, but mine never got the chance to try.

Undaunted, I tried again, this time with the lavender-flowered lemon-scented catnip cultivar ‘Citriodora’, thinking that its scent signature might make it less attractive to catnip predators. I was vigilant, scanning the yard frequently for signs of cat, and consequently this one lasted a day. The third time, thinking that a catmint might fare better than a catnip, I planted… N. 5faassenii ‘Mussinii’. I put a wire cage around it, so that one lasted the better part of a week. And then I gave up, resigning myself to a catmintless life.

In the meantime, to console myself, I read up on the genus, and was surprised to find it contains around 250 species, some of them quite unlike the gray-leaved lavender-spiked catmints I had thus far encountered. As members of the mint family (Lamiaceae), the catmints share many typical mint characteristics: blossoms composed of two “lips” (bilabial), aromatic leaves, squarish stems, and a reproductive exuberance that can express itself via self-seeding, root-spread, stolon-creep, or all three.

Their tendency to drought-tolerance, however, made the nepetas more attractive to me than other mints, for in those days I was having a hard time finding English cottage garden-style plants that could survive the summer-scorched alkaline soil of my Santa Fe yard. “If only,” I thought, “I could find a catmint the cats wouldn’t bother.”

My wish came true— and how—some years later. While scanning a plant society seed list, I came across mention of one N. sibirica, the Siberian catmint (Zones 3–8, 8–1). I couldn’t find mention of it in my plant books and I thought, “Surely if this catmint can survive a Siberian winter, it can survive a Santa Fe tomcat.” The seed, when it arrived, sprouted readily, and grew into a plant that I never would have recognized as a nepeta had I stumbled over it at a nursery. For one thing, it was three feet tall. For another, it was a resinously fragrant dark green all over, with heart-shaped leaves, and its many straight, upright stems ended in racemes of rather widely spaced puffs of large flowers that were nearly indigo-blue rather than the wishy-washy lilac that so often mars this genus.

Enchanted, I planted it in my Mediterranean plot in full sun, where my Mexican agastaches do so nicely. It promptly wilted in the summer heat…. I watered it and it perked right up again. As long as I kept watering it, it kept perking right up, and it charmed my blue-starved eyes outdoors and in…all that summer. And the cats didn’t bother it!

Next spring, while checking the Mediterranean bed for signs of attrition, I noticed an awful lot of dark green shoots peeping up from the snowmelt. My excitement turned to horror when I realized the full extent of this catmint’s vigor. In one season, my little four-inch pot had covered an area some two feet square.

…Regretfully, I dug out every stem and root I could find. [T]hree years later, I was still doing so. The year no N. sibirica showed itself I heaved a sigh of mingled relief and regret, for it really is a gorgeous creature. If I ever plant it again, I will give it a half-barrel all its own, like my Monarda ‘Croftway Pink’.

As long as we’re on the subject of Siberian catmint, I must mention Nepeta ‘Souvenir d’André Chaudron’ (sometimes listed as ‘Blue Beauty’), which most references list as a dwarf cultivar of N. sibirica. It grows to only 18 inches tall, but has the big dark violet-blue blossoms of the true Siberian, and, like N. sibirica, can be quite invasive. It is also as cute as all get out. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Mannerly Catmints

Much better behaved are the cultivars of the aforementioned N. 5faassenii (Zones 4–8, 8–1), which is a hybrid of N. racemosa (Zones 4–9, 8–1) and N. nepetella (Zones 6–9, 9–1).

The former is a lolling, densely furry, foot-high Iranian species bearing spikes of violet-calyxed, deep violet to lilac-blue flowers; the latter is a two-and-a-half-foot catmint native to North Africa and Iberia that bears whorls of pink to white blossoms the calyxes of which are frequently tinged pink or blue.
Both species, by the way, are worth growing in their own right, if you can find a reliable source. …

(photo by David Cavagnaro - click on image for larger version)


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