Apple Mint Plants

Mentha suaveolens

Apple Mint's flavour is more subtle and soothing than most of its siblings, so it makes an excellent cup of tea and is a good addition to chocolate mousses, dessert sauces, or fruit salads. The leaves are rounded and slightly furry, with a noticeably fruity-apple scent when crushed. The plant is very vigorous and spreads like wildfire if you let it. The small mauve flowers are not that impressive, but bees only care about what is inside and will thank you for letting some bloom. 

Growing Apple Mint

Mint thrives in almost any soil (rich in organic matter is best), and really only needs watering in dry weather to be on top form. It is a bigger plant than common garden spearmint and every bit as vigorous and invasive, so it's convenient to grow it in a large pot or a bottomless bucket sunk into the ground, leaving a 5cm rim above soil level.
Before it has a chance to flower in June, cut it down to the ground to encourage new young growth; the flavour alters slightly for the worse once the plant has flowered. Apple mint looks great towering above other herbs like Marjoram or Chives, producing a fabulously purple patch in your garden.

Don't plant mint varieties next to each other: Curiously, if you plant one type of mint right next to another, they lose their individual scent and flavour, so grow your mint varieties separately to keep them distinctive.

Features:

• Height: 60-100 cm
• Spread: infinite, unless contained
• Colour: green, rounded, slightly furry foliage, mauve flowers
• Flowers (if you let it): July-August, great for bees
• Uses: culinary, herb garden - good for cooking and tea
• Spacing: 30 cm
• Scent: apples and mint
• Habit: upright, vigorous
• Life: hardy perennial

Did You Know? 

Technically native to warmer southern parts of Western Europe, apple mint has long since naturalised across the rest of the continent. It has a venerable medicinal and culinary history as an aid to digestion, antibacterial agent, and balm for insect bites.
It is almost certainly not the mint mentioned in the Bible, which is likely to be Mentha sylvestris / longifolia. It is, however, a candidate for the mint that Hades, in his grief, summoned from the ashes of his lover, the Naiad-nymph Minthe, who got on the wrong side of Hades' wife, Demeter (invariably a bad move) by complaining loudly about Hades' affair with Persephone; some studies indicate that it was actually Persephone herself who vaporised poor Minthe, in order to make it clear who was the more lovely. To research this further, you can visit the mountain Minthi in the southern part of Elis county in the western Peloponnese.

Other common names include woolly, or round-leafed mint; there is a naturally occurring variegated form that is sold as pineapple mint. Taxonomists duelled bitterly over the proper name, with the Mentha rotundifolia, M. macrostachya and M. insularis gangs all vying for control until their defeat at the hands of the M. suaveolens mob.