The renowned French plantsman André Michaux was appointed by King Louis XVI as royal botanist and sent to the United States in 1785. Michaux was commissioned—with an annual salary of 2000 livres—to make the first organized investigation of plants in the New World that could be of value to the French.
Michaux traveled through the Appalachians in the late 1790s looking for unknown trees, shrubs, vines, creepers, forbs, herbs, wildflowers or other greenery to send back to his native land. (Plants from the New World were all the rage in Europe, both for their commercial value and as exotic components to royal gardens.)
In Pennsylvania the Frenchman encountered vigorous knee-high masses of a lovely scented plant he called “mountain mint. Today, that common name is used for more than 20 native species of the genus Pycnanthemum, meaning "many clustered flowers.”
The University of Tennessee Herbarium website lists eleven species and variants of mountain mint found in the Volunteer State from the crest of the Great Smokies to the Mississippi River.
- Photo taken along Dudley Creek Road in Gatlinburg.
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