How to Plant and Grow Bee Balm (Monarda)

How to Plant and Grow Bee Balm Monarda spp.

One of my absolute favorite flowers, I look forward to the day each year when the bee balm buds open into magnificent scarlet blooms, bringing a whole crew of ravenous hummingbirds into my yard.

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Incredibly beautiful, medicinal, and edible, it’s no wonder the birds and the bees love it too!

Best of all, there isn’t much to getting a patch established, and once you do, it will reward you with vibrant color and life year after year.

Bee balm is a perennial flowering herb in the mint family. Like many mints, it has a square stem, opposite leaves, and creeping rhizomes that spread rapidly under the soil.

There are quite a few varieties of Monarda. Perhaps the most commonly cultivated variety, M. didyma, boasts bright red tufted blossoms with tubular petals.

M. fistulosa, also known as wild bergamot, has similar shaped blooms of light purple or pink, and can be found growing wild in fields and prairies, and along roadsides and the edges of woods.

It commonly grows to about two to four feet high, though some dwarf varieties are shorter and can make great additions to containers or borders.

Bee balm attracts all sorts of pollinators, including bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. It is medicinal, edible, and delightfully fragrant,tasting a bit like oregano and mint, with a long history of human use.

Endemic to eastern North America, this plant has been used medicinally by many Native American communities throughout history, and was eventually adopted into medicinal use by early colonists as well.

This plant has many common names,