Catmint, Nepeta x faassenii
I love Catmint, especially the widely grown Nepeta x faassenii, a beautiful deciduous perennial with grey-green leaves and dense spikes of violet-blue flowers. I planted two varieties in our gravel garden last June and they flowered well in their first year. A year on, they are most impressive (as the above photo of our Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’ shows). The flowers are covered with honeybees, bumblebees and at least two species of solitary bees, while butterflies also visit from time to time.
The plants are also scented, a rather pungent herby smell. You wouldn’t want to use it in cooking, but the scent is reminiscent of other members of its family, the Lamiaceae, such as thyme, lavender and marjoram.
The closely related Catnip, Nepeta cataria, grows more upright, with white flowers. Both it and Nepeta x faassenii contain a volatile oil, nepetalactone, which many domestic and wild cats find attractive. The attraction is controlled by a dominant gene and up to 30% of domestic cats in a population may not respond. Kittens under three months old tend to avoid the plants and then can develop an attraction when they are older. Affected cats may sniff, lick and chew the plant and rub their heads against it, for up to fifteen minutes when the effect wears off. In extreme cases, cats can cause severe damage to the plant, which can be very annoying, especially if it isn’t your cat that is doing the damage.
In humans the same chemical is alleged to cause aggressive behaviour and The Poison Garden website suggests that a hangman might consume some Catmint on a working day to get into the right mood to perform his duties. Personally, I would find that a cat rolling in my patch of Catmint would invoke a similar response. Smoking Catmint appears to have the opposite effect – the Plants for a Future website says that smoking Nepeta cataria can produce euphoria and visual hallucinations. The plant also has diuretic properties when eaten.
Cats apart, I can’t recommend Catmint highly enough. Nepeta x faassenii likes a sunny spot with well drained soil but I have grown it on a bank in heavy clay at The Belvedere Centre in Norwich and it copes with some light shade. In our back garden, it grows in well drained soil with a gravel covering, in a bed that is in shade throughout the winter months. There are several well-known cultivars: ‘Six Hills Giant‘ grows to three feet tall, ‘Walker’s Low’ is a bit shorter but still upright and there are dwarfer forms such as ‘Kit Cat’, and the white flowered ‘Alba’ is also available. My second variety is the ordinary Nepeta x faassenii and that is also very lovely and grows to about two feet tall.
Update, December 2016: Anthophora quadrimaculata, the Four-banded Flower-bee
We have recently submitted bee records from our garden from the past four years. In doing so we have discovered that our garden has one of the most northerly British records of the solitary bee Anthophora quadrimaculata, the Four-banded Flower-bee.
Our Catmint is one of its favourite plants and small numbers of A. quadrimaculata have visited the flowers each summer since 2013.
The only other Norfolk records have been from another Norwich garden in September 1982 and on a cliff at Gorleston in July 2015 (Nick Owens, “Bees of Norfolk” (2017)).