Planted this last year and it feels so good to see it come back this year.
Oh wow, is that Monarda punctata? It’s beautiful! We have M. fistulosa and M. didyma and they’re wonderful as pollinator attractors, but we use the flowers in teas and the leaves as a replacement for oregano.
It is!! Good eye! I’ve heard you can make tea with it, but was too nervous to try lol. We planted it along with some other native pollinators to help the ecosystem. (Even if it’s insignificant)
Different resources advocate for just leaves, or just flowers, or some combination of the two. Personally, the flavor is a little too oregano for my tastes BUT if you harvest the flower tubules it’s slightly sweeter. If you were to take those, put them in a loosely closed mason jar for 24 hours, and then dry them after that short fermentation period you can mix them with dried raspberry leaves for a faux earl grey blend (if that’s your jam).
Even if it’s insignificant
Keep up the great work! Even one plant can support dozens of species and thousands of individuals interacting around it, and ‘no single raindrop believes it caused the flood’.
No effort is insignificant. You never know if a local population of something is depending on the last few host plants in your area and you are increasing their chances by a lot if that is the case.
Stupid squirrels ate all the flower buds off my M. punctata. 🤦♂️
I was waiting all summer for it to bloom.
You might be able to prompt additional flowers with pruning… On M. fistulosa, didyma, and bradburiana you’d look for a double set of leaves at an internode for pruning to promote a second flowering period. I’m not versed in pruning punctata, but the images I’ve seen seem to suggest a similar leaf structure. It might be worth cutting back to another node to see if it works.
In the squirrels’ defense, Monarda has long been regarded as medicine by many of the indigenous communities in its native range, and it’s very kind of you to be providing curative foods to them. It might be small consolation but their browse would spur additional vegetative growth that will allow the plant to be even larger than it would have otherwise been, so you’ll have more of it next year.
Yeah I’m basically running a squirrel grocery / pharmacy nowadays. Also serving the needs of the local slug population.
