Catnibbling Catnip

Like all the mints, it's a good news-bad news plant. The good news is that it's amazingly easy to grow. You can grow it, your kids can grow it, and even the neighbor's kids can grow it. Your cat might be able to grow it, too.

The bad news is that it's charming when it's small, but unfortunately for your landscaping plans, it grows up to be a rather weedy looking ragamuffin of a plant; tall and scraggly with charming heart-shaped leaves. Its appearance can be improved by pinching off the tops of the plant to encourage it to bush out more, but it's never going to be a lovely, thick border plant. However, when you mix it in with a patch of other mints or hide its woody stems with a patch of bright flowers, it adds an interesting bit of textural contrast to your landscape.

It's also a great plant for any wildscaper. Catnip is a favorite plant for bees, who will ignore other plants to come buzzing around the small pale flowers for a sip of its nectar. In fact if you wander in any garden store when catnip and the other mints are in bloom, you'll find that bees have strayed in from the surrounding areas to busy themselves with the mint flowers.

As with most easily grown plants, catnip is a real "travelin'" plant. From its original home in the eastern Mediterranean, it's traveled to all parts of the globe -- and has established itself in the wild on all the continents.

Catnip was cultivated for cats (and people) not by the cat-loving Egyptians, but by the ancient Greeks and Romans. From there it spread north across Europe and by the 1300s it was widely grown and used as a seasoning and as a drink. Before modern Chinese tea became widely available, catnip tea was a popular brew. It arrived in the U.S. with the early colonists and was a staple of most gardens. Brewed into a tea, it was used to alleviate coughing, cold symptoms, upset stomach and to aid sleep. Nowadays herbalists use catnip to treat tension and anxiety (it's a mild sedative and mood-lifter) and is occasionally