Nepeta nuda Annes Choice - Catnip

This Nepeta nuda 'Anne's Choice' is a truly charming variety of Catmint or Catnip, full of refinement and lightness. It is perfectly at home in a rural setting, a natural garden, or in an English-style border. It is a tall, bushy, and dense perennial plant, with dark flower stems that bear a multitude of small pastel lavender flowers throughout the summer. Easy to grow in well-drained soil, with low water requirements, this plant brings lightness to low or non-irrigated borders. It pairs beautifully with rockery stones and allows for beautiful flowering pots.

Nepeta nuda, a plant that cats adore, is a perennial belonging to the Lamiaceae family. It is native to central and eastern Europe, as well as western Asia. In the wild this catmint grows on clayey-chalky soils that are poor in organic matter and rather dry in summer.

The 'Anne's Choice' variety has been selected for its vigour and floriferousness. It is a ramified herbaceous perennial with a bushy habit, forming a tuft 1.20 m (4ft) in height when in flower and occupying 70-80 cm (28-32in) of space on the ground. The foliage is deciduous, it disappears in winter and reappears in spring. In spring a cluster of sturdy, branched stems emerges from the stump bearing almost glabrous, crenate, oblong leaves, with a matte green colour on the upper side and pale green on the underside, which emit an interesting fragrance when crushed, reminiscent of buckwheat pancakes, mint, and animal musk. The flowering usually begins in June (sometimes earlier in hot climates, before the heat and summer drought), and lasts until July-August. The fine, branched flower spikes, of a brown-purple colour, are covered in a profusion of tiny flowers in a lovely pastel shade, between pink and mauve, with dull pink bracts, highly visited by pollinating insects.

The beauty of its foliage, the generosity of its flowering, and its lightness make Nepeta Anne's Choice an essential plant for dry or mountain gardens. This tall and unassuming but remarkably generous plant is also easy to combine in flower borders with other perennials (yarrow, penstemons, perennial geraniums, linarias, gauras) or small flowering shrubs such as bluebeards, mallows, or shrubby salvias and dwarf buddleias. This catmint is very easy to incorporate into flowering pots. It is superb in rockeries or on walls, which it dominates with its flowering height, for example in the company of prostrate aster, Erigeron karvinskianus, creeping rosemary, or wall bellflowers.