One of the key components of landscape design, and something that separates the regular Joe from the professional designer, is the art and science of selecting the right plant for the right place. Your design intent can quickly be lost if you select the wrong plant for your space. Take calamintha for instance. This habitat-builder is a wonderful garden edition with pretty petite white flowers (boasting an extensive 4-6 week bloom time), minty fragrance, tactile quality, drought tolerant hardiness and ecological bonus points for supporting local birds and butterflies. Really there aren’t many cons to mention to this herbaceous perennial in the Lamiaceae family. Unless of course your design calls for a nice drift of calmintha beside your rudbeckia row and you put Calamintha nepeta in the ground. This self-seeding, hairy variety will quickly take over your garden and those quaint little circles and drifts that you drew on the original landscape design now mean nothing because you didn’t use the right plant in the right place. This mistake will cost you many long hours bent over your garden beds, trying to fight the way a plant is naturally inclined to grow. More input for less output than what the right variety would give you.

Calamintha nepeta subspecies nepeta is the ticket. All the benefits of calamintha without the self seeding. We’re not saying self seeding is a bad quality, just that a non-sterile Calamintha nepeta will not play nicely with your design. Remember it all goes back to your design intent; right plant, right place requires some thought but will save you a whole lot of work in the long run.