WATERMINT (Mentha aquatica), is a very common plant found throughout Britain, save the more extreme uplands. Wherever it grows, it, unsurprisingly, needs a ditch, a pondside, wet pasture, a damp roadside or pathway, or, more particularly, a streamside—‘on the cress-strewn streamlet’s brink’, as one truly awful 19th-century poem has it.
It is one of our most distinctive plants, immediately recognisable by its pointed, oval and slightly hairy leaves, which often (1625), implores us to plant ‘Burnet, Wild Thyme, and Watermints… to have the pleasure when you walk or tread’. Indeed, it is often their released perfume that reveals the plants.