Mint

Why I Plant Mint

By Stuart Schadt

The people on the television garden shows are inspiring and give great advice but they are not always right. When the man on the garden show said, “never plant mint, it will spread out and take over your whole garden.” He was right and he was wrong. Mint will spread out and try to take over the garden but I always plant mint.

I always plant mint just below the hose bib. “The mint likes the extra water,” My mother always said. When I was twelve we moved from LaMarque, Texas to Houston where I would spend my teenage years. The only plant we took from our garden was mint from beneath the hose bib by the back door.

In Houston we planted the Mint beneath the hose bib by the driveway.

When my wife Pam and I settled into our first home in Galveston, Texas after seminary I knew the first thing our garden needed was mint to plant beneath the hose bib. When we left Galveston we took a pot of mint with us to plant at our new house in Houston. And a few years later when we left Houston for Virginia, of course we took mint with us.

Yes mint doesn’t stay where you put it. My mint is always spreading throughout the garden. Sometimes it is pushing out the boundaries of its areas. Sometimes it sends “secret” runners ten or fifteen feet through the garden to show up in surprising places.

Some people might think traveling mint in the garden is a problem. Some might say “never plant mint.” But I will always plant mint because when I pull up that traveling mint, crushing its leaves and releasing its fragrant scent I travel with the mint to the Places from where its roots come. I am in the back yard in Houston where my daughter, Hanna, climbed her swing set, and gave “tea” to Eliza, the sheepdog in her playhouse. I am swept to the house in Galveston, baby Hanna splashing in a little back yard wading pool. I am back at the House in Houston where I was a gloomy teenager. And I am in LaMarque where every summer afternoon my mother would send me out to pick mint to put in the salt glazed pitcher with the tea bags for ice tea. I am for a moment sitting at the table on our screened in back porch where we ate every summer meal. My father is drinking from a super sized ice tea glass and my two brothers and I from average size glasses. And all of life lay before us with its hopes, its dreams and its promises.

If you plant mint it will travel to unexpected places in your garden. I plant mint because it takes me to the wonderful places of my life.