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The Scarce Plants of Essex. Part 2.
throat but at a distance they look pale bluish grey. Whereas those of C. ascendens arc larger, again
whitish, but suffused with pale pinkish-lilac and with obvious red-purple spotting on the lower lip
and in the throat. The slightly larger flowers have a wider upper lip with the edges slightly reflexed
- and they come into flower several weeks earlier. C calamintha, however, flowers on into November,
and sets seed in late autumn, making it very vulnerable to flail mowing. Five bunches of white hairs
just inside the calyx tube serve to delay seed release. In C. ascendens they arise almost at right
angles, forming a more or less flat intersecting grid, whereas in C. calamintha they arise at a shallow
angle and intersect to form a cone that protrudes slightly beyond the tubular part of the calyx. Stella
Ross-Craig (1979) says that the anthers of C. calamintha are cream coloured and those of C. ascendens
scarlet. This would be a useful character if it applied throughout both populations, but both our
plants can have deep lilac anthers, though those of C. ascendens can sometimes be red or have a
slight reddish tinge to the lilac. In both taxa the two lower calyx teeth are curved upwards, but in C.
ascendens they have consistently longer, spaced hairs, looking like a comb and obvious to the naked
eye, of about the same width as the base of the calyx teeth (0.2-0.6mm), whereas in C. calamintha
they are relatively inconspicuous, shorter than the width of the teeth (to c.0.2mm), with only the
occasional long hair. The lower pair of calyx teeth themselves overlap in length between the two
taxa, although they are on average slightly longer (to 3.0mm) in C. ascendens. In addition C.
calamintha plants tend to be sprawling, with denser cymes of flowers, whereas C. ascendens, as its
name suggests, is more of an upright plant with more distant less closely bunched fascicles of flowers.
Unfortunately, probably because most botanists only see C. calamintha on a herbarium sheet, the
characters emphasized for their separation, overlap in size and form far more than suggested, and
are pretty useless unless you have both plants to hand for comparison. The bulk of the British
Clinopodium calamintha
Essex Naturalist (New Series) 17 (2000)