Pycnanthemum virginianum

(Mountain Mint)

Pycnanthemum virginianum is the perfect nectar flower, providing bountiful energy to preying insects as they hunt the pests in your garden. Mountain Mint is the perfect butterfly plant as well, growing in thick clumps of ground cover with pinkish blooms. Pycnanthemum virginianum grows to modest heights of around three feet and blooms in late summer. Mountain Mint is yet another herb of the plains used often by Native Americans to make an energizing tea as well as for the flavoring of food for its lightly sweet scent, or even as an edible green. Settlers used it for animal bites. This wildflower is obviously well tolerant of wet ground and grows well in partial shade. Mountain Mint is also known to many as wild basil and Prairie Hyssop. This wildflower is very cold hardy and in fact needs cold snaps to improve its growth.