HERB - safety of orange bergamot mint

[Jenne Heise]

I have a safety question relating to the long-ago disucssion of the child
who died from 'an overdose of peppermint tea'  and the probablity that the
batch of tea involved was contaminated with pennyroyal.

I have had, for many years, in my other's garden, a big patch of what the
local herb shop owner confirmed for me as being orange bergamot mint. (Now
that was 15 years ago, when I was still supporting my herb habit by
bartering stuff I grew for store credit.. and it may have mutated since
then.) Jo Ann Gardener's description  in _Living with Herbs_: "the
dark-stemmed organge or bergamot mint (M. x piperita 'Citrata'), its large
leaves thinly lined with red at their edges, and with a citrusy or sharp
flavor" certainly fits it.

This stuff is an amzing groundcover-- only occasional blades of grass and
thistles can poke through it, and it fought the ivy in my mother's
backyard to a standstill (It also tied with Lemon balm for control of
another area. We controlled it by mowing it periodically and weeeding
where the edge of the bed met the lawn.

So, we had a lot of it. It made lousy tea, and you wouldn't want to use it
in salad (I recall my one abortive attempt in that direction in high
school-- ugh.) but it was good, dried, in potpourris, and lately I thought
I had found it's ultimate purpose-- I used it in sekanjibin and the
results were amazngly good.

However... then I started to get nervous. This stuff is the toughest
mint I've ever seen, with strong, rough stems and what has to be a very
high menthol content. It's darker than peppermint, almost bordering on the
coloration of  pennyroyal. The botanical name suggests that it may be a
most closely related to the peppermint. But is there a chance that
sekanjibin could be dangerous?


Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise	      jenne at tulgey.browser.net
disclaimer: i speak for no-one and no-one speaks for me.
	"Oh it's all too much, too grim, too lovely, too -- how should 
	I put this? It's general chaos." -- Edward Gorey

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