Kitchenware and Tableware Market

Paradise is at once so attainable and so far away.

This column was going to be about how the most immediate and affordable thing that Southern California homeowners could do to reduce our collective dependency on fossil fuel would be to rip out lawn. But events in the Gulf of Mexico are too crazy-making to be sure that it wouldn’t be the garden-writing equivalent of picking a fight at the dinner table. So this column is about coyote mint.

It is sheer serendipity that coyote mint is one of the most seductive late-June bloomers to win converts to sustainable gardening.

As taxonomists have it, Monardella villosa has a native range that descends from the Oregon border to Santa Barbara. But as the 1-foot-tall-by-3-foot-wide tufts of coyote mint that soldier it out in my midcity Los Angeles garden can attest, these plants do just fine farther south. You must excuse them if, by August, with little more than weekly watering, they shed their leaves.

Oh, those leaves! We all think that we know mint, with flavors so sharp and intriguingly base that we pay for the same flavor in toothpaste as in ice cream. That is, of course, a prelude to “but” — and it’s a big one.