Both Sight and Scent: Agastaches Have It All!

Have you ever planted a garden for more than just visual appeal? Have you ever walked through a yard and suddenly found yourself stopped in your tracks by a luscious scent? How about both? Both beauty AND scent? And easy to care for? And seemingly in all colors? Not to mention being bee and hummingbird magnets? I must be out of my mind! Actually, no, I'm just crazy about agastaches.

Agastache (pronounced aeg-uh-STACK-ee) is a genus with species that are native to Asia and North America. They're readily available from most online nurseries, although you might be lucky enough to find them in your own local nurseries. They range in color from white to yellow to pink to pastel pinks and oranges to fiery oranges and reds, and even blue (not a true blue like delphiniums & irises, but pretty close). They grow in some of the more unforgiving desert environments, such as hot dry deserts, but that doesn't mean you have to live in Death Valley to grow these. There are agastaches that are more than happy to live in moister soils, soaking up the water as it's provided, as long as they don't have wet feet and are grown in full sun.




Agastaches can get quite big for a herbaceous plant. Some of mine get to be approximately 4 feet around and 4 feet tall. They bloom for months at a time, usually starting in the middle of summer and lasting all the way through the early frost season. My frost season usually arrives much sooner than in other parts of the country, but I can count on agastaches blooming from June until early October. They also can be almost evergreen at the base, and some of them are the first things to send up leaves in early spring. They send up a spike full of arrowhead-shaped leaves, and the top 3-12" (depending on the cultivar) will carry the flowers. The flowers are usually tubular in shape and individual, but some are more like catkins than others.





Now that I've talked about some of the basics of agastaches, I can move on to my favorite feature: the scent. There are many varieties of agastaches, but most of them share one common feature: They smell like root beer. Yes, they honestly smell like a mug of warm root beer. It's the plant, not the flowers, that smells, although even the seeds and the dead winter-kill stems smell like root beer. You can make a tea out of the leaves, but I've never tried it, so I don't know whether it would taste like root beer. I know that some varieties are edible, but please be very cautious and contact your local ag center or poison control center before trying to nibble on a strange plant. Walking past a row of agastaches can result in your clothes smelling like root beer, your shoes, everything! You can definitely smell them from a good distance away, and since it's such a unique smell, that makes it an even more attractive plant.

If you're looking for a beautiful, hardy, scented plant that attracts hummingbirds and bees, readily grows from seed, and tolerates poor soil and high temperatures, then perhaps an agastache, or two or three, may be what you need.




(all pictures are of plants I have grown in my own yard that have survived a minimum of two winters in zone 5)