Apple Mint
Mentha suaveolens
A softly hairy mint with rounded, wrinkled grey-green leaves sitting almost stalkless on square stems that reach about a metre. Tiny pink-white flowers crowd into dense tapering spikes at the stem tips. Crushed leaves give a mint scent with a fruity, slightly musty edge rather than the sharp bite of spearmint. Mints hybridise freely and wild plants often sit between species, but for the kitchen the combination of woolly rounded leaf and mild fruity scent is enough — it suits teas, sauces and fruit dishes.
Damp, disturbed, sunny ground: ditch edges, riverbanks, verges, damp waste ground and the margins of gardens it has spread from. Naturalised rather than truly native in Britain, commonest in southern England and Wales and scarcer northwards and in Ireland.
Apple mint has no toxic parts and the leaves are safe raw or cooked in culinary amounts. Pennyroyal (Mentha pulegium) is the one mint worth avoiding: it creeps low with small narrow leaves and flowers in whorls up the stem, never the tall woolly stems and dense terminal spikes seen here. Wash plants taken from ditches or grazed ground.
Always use more than one reference to confirm a plant. You are responsible for what you choose to forage.
Habit and stem
Forms spreading patches from creeping underground rhizomes, with upright stems to about a metre. The stems are square in cross-section and noticeably hairy, which places the plant in the mint family before any leaf detail is checked.
Leaves
Rounded to broadly oval, blunt-toothed, wrinkled above and densely white-woolly beneath, set in opposite pairs and nearly stalkless against the stem. Spearmint and peppermint leaves are narrower, pointed and carried on a short clear stalk.
Flower spikes
Dense, tapering spikes of tiny pale pink to white flowers at the tops of the stems in July and August. Flowers gathered in separate whorls at the leaf joints instead, with a leafy shoot continuing above them, point to whorled or corn mint rather than this plant.
Crush test
Crush a leaf between finger and thumb: a mint scent with a fruity, faintly musty apple note. A harsh cold menthol hit suggests peppermint, and no scent at all means it is not a mint — white deadnettle has the same square stem and paired toothed leaves but is scentless.
Updated 2026-08-08T11:13:28.897Z · Part of the shared Foragers Log catalogue · Herb