you got me in a sway

Great body image perspectives AND WITH DOGGOS, NO LESS

They’re lovely, but they MUST be kept in a pot, or a raised bed, or on a good-quality leash with a chest harness, because mint and its cousins spread like… IDEK, like a rash. Like dandelions. They’re tough, hardy and highly motivated. Even a tiny root fragment will suddenly turn into a Mint Tree if you don’t tear it up. I swear I’ve seen new plants popping up from BURIED SCRAPS OF LEAF. Once they’re in the ground they establish a beachhead and spawn secretly, possibly through osmosis. I cannot advise you to stick a mint plant in the ground unless you are a bold and unconventional disciplinarian.

The joke is that after running around after the mint like a spaniel chasing a whack-a-mole for a year, Dr Glass then planted a plant that would do the same thing.

You know what would be a lovely herbal lawn? Chamomile. Because it’s a damn compact, densely-growing, hardy, winter-green perennial that’s springy underfoot, smells nice when you walk on it, and has some basic manners. Lawn chamomile is plushy and soft and produces tiny pretty daisy-looking flowers. It naturally stays at pretty much the height you would want grass to be, and then you can cut it and it goes “fair enough.”

Mint is not any of those things. Mint is leggy, patchy, muddy and rampageous. It grows randomly and fitfully. It bullies other plants. It sends runners into the neighbor’s houses and across the street and it barks at the postman. Your mint lawn would look like a poorly tended graveyard AND THEN IN THE WINTER IT WOULD DIE, DRAMATICALLY, and ROT THERE. It would outcompete native plants and eat your vegetable garden alive. It is so wet and stalky that it would be dreadful to trim, and when you trimmed it, it would scab over and sulk. It would refuse to grow where it was put (the lawn) and would instead show up in places you don’t want it (the patio, the sidewalk, your intrusive thoughts.) IT IS AN INVASIVE PLANT, WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO YOUR FAMILY

The thing with mint is that it’s not necessarily a lot of Invasive Species watch lists, it’s *an* invasive - an unscientific and loose term for things whose natural history and reproductive habits mean they can quickly outcompete native organisms. It isn’t An Invasive Plant ™ in its native soils, which are around Europe and the MENA region. Instead, it behaves invasively, like bindweed.

Mint’s brilliant, admirable secret is its long runners, or horizontal water-seeking roots. A tiny sprig will produce extremely long underground runners that can be many feet long. If a runner encounters a water source, it can suck it up and feed the host plant (so a mint plant growing in the middle of barren concrete may be slurping up water from a garden across the street, or a leaking pipe under the sidewalk, or possibly Neptune.) and each runner can also pop up a stalk in a new location, creating a new plant. A section of runner or other root is perfectly capable of making a new plant, so a fragment of buried root in a neighbor’s garden could result in a mint popping up in your patio. Mint also spreads by seed, so it disperses very efficiently.

Why is this a problem? Eh, it’s not really. It’s simply doing what’s in its nature. I always advocate for that. But it will outcompete your garden in most conditions - I.e if your other herbs want water, mint will steal it out from under them. It’s a water hog, as simple as that. In dry conditions or climates it will politely limit itself to places where it is given water, but if you start watering another part of the garden - maybe you want to cultivate a rose, or an olive tree - the mint will magically show up there, banging its water dish and looking expectant. And it will say “I had a secret runner that went here, Just In Case.” And you’ll say “fair enough, you mad bastard.”

But you’re right, my terminology was unclear. It’s a confusing way to use it and I won’t do it again

they establish a beachhead and spawn secretly, possibly through osmosis

like a spaniel chasing a whack-a-mole for a year

pettiness expressed via herbology,

plant-based vengeance

i have absolutely thrown mint roots into the perfectly manicured lawns of people i hate.

[Chamomile] has some basic manners

Mint is… rampageous. It bullies other plants…. It barks at the postman

like a poorly tended graveyard

It’s like asking why people don’t make lawns out of cabbages, or hyenas, or the cold virus

so a mint plant growing in the middle of barren concrete may be slurping up water from a garden across the street, or a leaking pipe under the sidewalk, or possibly Neptune.

In dry conditions or climates it will politely limit itself to places where it is given water, but if you start watering another part of the garden - maybe you want to cultivate a rose, or an olive tree - the mint will magically show up there,

banging its water dish and looking expectant

“fair enough, you mad bastard.”

This Mint Discourse is the karmic price I must pay, since two years ago my husband chucked a mint plant into the field of a farmer he didn’t like, and I… Reader, I let him do it

credible form of botanical terrorism.

Feinstein: You’re a big, powerful man. Why didn’t you [gestures pushing motion]?

Crews: Senator, as a black man in America [sigh]…

Feinstein: Say it as it is. I think it’s important.