Experts Urge People to Scatter Mint Leaves Around Their Gardens for One Important Reason

There’s hardly any plant that can match the soothing quality of mint. According to the New York Botanical Garden, a legend runs among Greeks that mint is a nymph named Minthe, who was magically transformed into a plant by the queen of the underworld, Persephone, who came to know about her secret love affair with her husband, Hades. Besotted in love, Hades diminished the curse's power by blessing mint with its characteristic minty fragrance. Ancient Greeks rubbed their tables with mint leaves before serving meals, believing that mint re-awakens the spirit. Likewise, today, the refreshing potion of mint leaves can re-awaken the spirit of a garden by squashing the spirits of all those sneaky rodents who may uninvitingly slip inside your plants and spoil them.

Experts at EpicGardening.com share how planting mint can deter these pestering bugs from your garden space. The smell of mint is a natural deterrent for rodents, making it a great addition to any garden with a rat problem. Keep a few pots around the perimeter of your garden and inside the greenhouse rather than planting in the ground to control spread,” the website explains. If planting another plant is too much of a task, the experts suggest scattering crushed mint leaves around the openings of your garden, nursery, or greenhouse, or creating a border of this herb like a fence around your garden. Alternatively, some cotton balls dipped in peppermint oil can also serve the purpose.

Due to their poor sense of vision, most rodents are dependent on their strong sense of smell to scan their surroundings. The smell of peppermint can trick, confuse, and disorient them into thinking that they shouldn’t enter the garden. According to Truly Nolen Pest Control, peppermint is a “natural remedy that can be used to effectively ward off mice and rats.” Peppermint, the website says, contains a potent compound known as “menthol,” which confuses rodents' nasal cavities. The repellent scent causes them to stray away from the garden. “Spray the essential oil into corners of your home that you think rodents can most easily access, and be sure to focus on areas that don't contain mousetraps,” the experts suggest.

Another advantage of using mint as a pest repellent is that it doesn’t harm the garden plants by contaminating their soil with chemicals. GardeningKnowHow points out how many commercially available pest repellent manufacturers replaced the harmful chemical ingredients with peppermint oil, considering plant safety. To make peppermint even stronger and more effective, gardeners can also blend it with citronella oil, as David’s Garden Seeds explains.

Other bug-repellent options, apart from peppermint, can be lemongrass, marigolds, nasturtiums, pennyroyal, and eucalyptus oil. You can also use herbs like basil, echinacea, garlic, thyme, and cayenne pepper. Spearmint essential oil mixed with a little witch hazel is just as powerful. Spearmint or peppermint, the mint plant essentially is a wondrous apothecary managed probably by the spirit of Minthe. Minthe doesn’t just cater to humans with clinking glasses of iced mint tea or minty mocktails but also dignifies the status of luxury, as verbalized by the Australian musician Izzy Azalea. “Luxury lives in the finer details. It's a cloth napkin at a dinner table. It's a mint on your pillow before bed.”