Nepitella: Wikipedia doesn’t even know what it is

Nepitella was handed to me while I was at work by the Chef du Cuisine in a plastic container that “to go” salads are often placed in. My job was to pick the Nepitella that would later be mixed with salad greens. I looked at it funny. It looked like mint but it had the shape of oregano…if oregano was heart shaped.


Turns out that nepitella is in fact a mint; a wild mint. It’s majority of fame stems (pun intended) from Tuscany, Italy, where it was used in dishes but the origin of the plant is from Southern Europe. The plant itself can grow up to 18 inches and dons lavender blue flowers at the ends of each stem. When not involved in a recipe, the plant was used for medicinal purposes in the Medieval Times as a digestive aid, to promote sweating, and for insomnia.

You can grow this in a sunny location but finding it at your local gardening store may be hard. You can order nepitella online between March and November. When you order, be sure to get more than you expect, that way you can stop using pepto bismol for that indigestion.




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