Mountain Coyote Mint Seeds (Monardella odoratissima)

The Great Central Plain of California…was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that, in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step. Mints, gilias, nemophilas, castilleias, and innumerable composite were so crowded together that, had ninety-nine percent of them been taken away, the plain would still have seemed…extravagantly flowery. - John Muir, The Bee Pastures of California (1882) Mountain coyote mint is a plant of rocky open ground, a summer-blooming wildflower that smells like the essence of a dryland sunset, a plant of fragrant landscapes occurring alongside Madias, and Hemizonias, and Salvias – vaporizing, volatile, resinous plants that perfume wind currents arising up along the Pacific Coast, sweeping inward and over the Sierra Nevada into the Great Basin. It’s in the name…odoratissma. The most fragrant. This is a bee balm; the West’s answer to the eastern genus Monarda, a group of exceptional bee plants. Like its eastern kin, it draws multitudes: Anthidium mormonum (the wool-collecting Mormon bee!), Osmia brevis, Osmia densa, Osmia granulosa, Osmia paradisica (the mason bee of paradise!), Osmia penstemonis, Trachusa timberlakei, Bombus fervidus (the fiery and ardent bumble bee!), Bombus insularis (the isolationist and detached bumble bee!). Also there are the butterflies – the many coppers and blues, the hummingbirds as well of course. Still, look more closely. Mountain coyote mint is a lush landscape to numerous tiny thrips, hunted by their larger predators: the lady beetles, lacewings, and pirate bugs. This is a low-growing, long-lived perennial – and sprawling – never ascending skyward much more than about 12-inches. The pale lavender-purple flowers are ignored by browsing deer, who find the minty taste unpalatable. Plant mountain coyote mint in the hardest places. Among the rocks where soil moisture is brief and scarce. In sunbaked front yards, and along the sides of desolate gravel roads. It is native across most of the land from Southern inland British Columbia to Baja, touching the coast in central California and the western edge of the Rockies. Mountain coyote mint seems to germinate best when the seeds are cold stratified, exposed to about 90-days of cool, wet conditions, then surface sown outdoors where germination tends to occur in the spring over about a month, under prolonged temperatures in the 60-70 degrees Fahrenheit range. With time, tiny seedlings mature into semi-woody clumps that can be divided to create more plants, or propagated from cuttings that root semi-easily when treated with rooting hormone and damp, shaded conditions. 50+ seeds (0.05 grams)