Mentha - Water Mint
| There are a number of members of the Mint family which are suitable for the water garden. All have strongly aromatic foliage and produce neat and attractive blossoms as well. The common Water Mint is Mentha aquatica, a plant that looks much like the culinary mint, but with dense rounded, hairy green foliage with a purplish infusion borne on slender reddish stems. The soft lilac-pink blossoms are like miniature powder puffs and encircle the stems during mid and late summer. The Slender Water Mint, Mentha diemenica, is a native Australian species.
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 Mentha diemenica
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| This has short erect stems clothed with slender aromatic oval to lance-shaped, mid to dark green leaves.Light lavender-mauve to lilac blossoms are produced during summer in the axils of the leaves. Although capable of growing in the shallow margins of a pond, it prefers to colonise moist or boggy areas adjacent the pond, even in partial shade. Mentha cervina is more clump-forming than either of its cousins and has slender erect stems clothed in small lance-shaped leaves which are crowned during late summer with stiff whorled spikes of dainty ultramarine to lilac flowers. There is also a white-flowered variety M. cervina var.alba. The whole plant is strongly aromatic and is happiest when growing in very shallow water at the pond edge. All three plants, but more especially Mentha aquatica, are very useful scrambling marginal aquatics, growing within the pond and successfully disguising the harsh edges where the pond meets adjacent dry land.
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 Mentha cervina var.alba
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Plant during spring and summer in either a heavy loam soil or an aquatic planting compost and top-dress the compost with fine washed gravel. Although it is possible to propagate Water Mint by division it is very much easier and more satisfactory to do so from short stem cuttings in spring or summer. Remove these at a leaf joint. They should ideally be of non-flowering growth.
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If there are any flowers, remove these along with any lower leaves. The cuttings should be 4 to 6cm long and rooted in trays of mud or soil based potting compost mix that is just submerged beneath the water in a bowl and placed in a shaded cold frame. Rooting takes ten days to two weeks.
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 Mentha aquatica.
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