One botanist named 434 new mints in five years; most were not real
Mints cross-breed so freely that botanists have published more than 3,000 names for them. Between 1911 and 1916 one taxonomist described 434 new kinds from central Europe alone. Today experts accept only 18 to 24 species, and even peppermint turns out to be a hybrid, bred from water mint and spearmint.
Mentha belongs to the Lamiaceae, the family that also holds basil, rosemary, sage, oregano and catnip. Mints are aromatic perennials with square stems and paired, often downy, toothed leaves that range from dark green to purple, bluish or pale yellow. Small white to purple flowers cluster in whorl-like rings along the stem. Plants grow between 10 and 120 centimetres tall, but their real talent is spreading: runners creep both above and below ground, over an area with no fixed limit, which is why some mints count as invasive.
The naming chaos comes from biology. Where species overlap they hybridise naturally, several species may themselves stem from ancient crosses, and seeds from hybrids produce unpredictable offspring that can then spread by runners. Most of the thousands of published names are now treated as synonyms or invalid. Even the genus boundary shifts: a 2004 molecular study argued for including two outlying species, and a 2007 treatment dropped one of them again.
Many garden favourites are hybrids. Peppermint, including the chocolate mint cultivar, combines water mint and spearmint. Ginger mint mixes corn mint with spearmint, and the hybrid of spearmint and apple mint goes by names such as mojito mint and, in Cuba, yerba buena. In recipes, plain mint leaves generally means spearmint. Plants called Vietnamese mint or Mexican mint marigold belong to other genera entirely.
The word travelled from Greek mintha, recorded in Linear B, through Latin mentha. Greek myth made it Minthe, a nymph loved by Hades whom Persephone or Demeter turned into the plant. Mints now grow across every inhabited continent, happiest beside water in cool, partly shaded spots, though they tolerate full sun. Fossil seeds named Mentha pliocenica, from Pliocene deposits on the Dnieper in south-eastern Belarus, closely resemble those of today's water mint.
Source: Mentha
