After a quarter century, a taste of home

Growing yerba buena, a mint that was once a mystery

Now that the winter rains have set in, I've harvested all the herbs from the garden, racing to preserve them before the frosts kill everything off.

The resinous herbs went into another big batch of herb-garlic salt, heavy on the thyme and za'atar this year. The softer herbs I have gathered in waves, filling up the trays in the dehydrator, stripping off the leaves after they shrivel and crisp, then heading back outside for more.

Last year, I just tossed all of these soft herbs—six or seven kinds of mint, lemon verbena, Thai basil flowers—into a jar and labeled the blend "yard tea." I gave several small jars away as gifts, but later discovered people weren't drinking my yard tea because they worried I had added actual bits of yard.

This year's potted mint harvest was scantier than last year's. My Australian mint bush died off in the ice storm of early 2024. June's heat wave ravaged the spearmints and peppermints. The dearth of proper mints gave me an excuse to thin out the growing thicket of yerba buena I planted in the front lawn three years ago.

It is an herb I have waited three decades to taste.

In my early 20s, not long after moving to San Francisco, I learned that the city's original name came from the wind mint that covered the hills when the Spanish friars moved in. Yerba Buena. Good herb. Although yerba buena apparently still grows in the Presidio, I never got to taste the original scent of San Francisco in all the years I lived there. I'd daydream about climbing Telegraph Hill before it was encased in concrete and buildings, the smell of wild mint erupting from every footstep, mingling with the misty, saline winds coming up off the bay.

It took a Portland Nursery run for me to finally smell actual yerba buena, Clinopodium douglasii—in Portland's native plant section, no less. Yerba buena, it turns out, grows west of the Cascades all the way from Southern California through British Columbia. The "douglas" in its scientific name is the David Douglas who accompanied Lewis and Clark. One of its other settler names is "Oregon tea."

It had dozens of true names before that, most buried during the genocidal attempts to erase the West Coast's indigenous languages and cultures. Although the Native American ethnobotanical database has not recorded any of these true names, it contains glimpses of the role of yerba buena role in the lives of West Coast people — from the southernmost Luiseño and Mahuna lands north through Ohlone land, Yurok land, Kalapuyan land, and W̱SÁNEĆ land to the far north of us. These glimpses suggest that yerba buena has always been savored as a tea, drunk to soothe the stomach, to treat colds and toothaches, to strengthen the blood, or simply for the taste.

This year, I harvested several batches of the yerba buena that has thrived in the shadow of our plum tree. A soft, candy-like aroma—not biting like peppermint, or brisk and bracing like spearmint—rose up from my knees and boots each time I knelt down to clip off more. A good herb.

I carried bundles of the thick-stemmed, foot-long whips, with their stiff, rounded leaves, into the kitchen to wash and wash again. The whips were so sturdy that it took a good eight hours in the dehydrator before the leaves were dry enough to slip off the stem. Even then, they did not crumble like peppermint or anise hyssop.

You wouldn't want to chew yerba buena or chop it to sprinkle over yogurt or pasta. But tea? Tea suits it. A fat pinch of these dried leaves, infused in boiling water, emits a soft and precise mintiness, with perhaps a tinge of camphor underneath and some bright citrus above.

Because the point of making herb salt and mint tea isn't just to avoid waste but to capture the taste of this place, most of the yerba buena went into a new batch of yard tea. I crushed most of it up and mixed it with the small amounts of peppermint, mojito mint, Persian mint, Kentucky mint, anise hyssop, and lemon verbena I was able to gather. This year, I'll try to come up with a more poetic name for the results. Tisane aux herbes demi-sauvages, perhaps. Or The Gathered Mints, which sounds like it toured the Greenwich Village folk clubs in the early 1960s.

You may not drink it, but it’s still yard tea to me.

Most of the herbs are now razed to the ground, and if another hard freeze hits this winter I'll have to buy new seedlings next spring. Yerba buena, I trust, will take care of itself. It belongs here. It knows what to do come ice storm or heat. After wondering about its scent for so many decades, I am grateful to have it here in my yard, and gratified I enjoy its taste.

Its geographic range suggests that Clinopodium douglasii is one of the uniting characteristics of our long, narrow strip of seismically volatile coast. A scrubby, tendrilly groundcover that has soothed and healed the land's first peoples and maps our modern-day cultural boundaries. Perhaps, when I moved from California to Oregon, I never truly left one place to settle in another. I simply stayed in the land of the good herb. We are all Yerba Buenans here.