Genovese basil

Lemon thyme (Thymus × citriodorus) is a low, mat-forming evergreen sub-shrub grown for its small leaves that release a bright, distinctly lemony scent alongside the usual warm thyme aroma. It stays under a hand-span tall, spreads into a fragrant carpet, and carries pink to lavender flowers in mid to late summer that bees and butterflies work hard. It is a kitchen herb first, excellent in cooking and teas, and a tough, drought-tolerant edging or paving plant second. Its taxonomy is genuinely unsettled: long treated as a garden hybrid of common thyme, more recent work disputes whether it is a hybrid or a distinct species, and sources disagree on whether it has any wild native range, so Plotwright records it as a cultivated plant without a mapped wild distribution.

A bushy, lemon-scented herbaceous perennial of the mint family, grown for its wrinkled, ovate medium-green leaves that crush to a bright citrus fragrance. Tiny two-lipped white-to-pale-yellow flowers appear in the leaf axils through summer and draw bees. Native to southern Europe, it has escaped gardens and naturalized across much of the U.S.; frequent pruning keeps it leafy, curbs self-seeding, and produces the most fragrant new growth.

A rhizomatous, upright herbaceous perennial of the mint family, most commonly grown as a culinary or medicinal herb and as a ground cover. A natural hybrid of watermint (Mentha aquatica) and spearmint (Mentha spicata), it carries fragrant rounded-to-lance-shaped toothed leaves on square stems and showy pink flower spikes in mid- to late summer. Native to Europe, it spreads aggressively by rhizomes into an attractive ground cover and rarely sets seed, so it is propagated vegetatively and is best confined by a soil barrier (Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder).

A rough, sprawling Mediterranean annual grown for showy, open racemes of drooping, star-shaped bright blue flowers in summer. Branched stems and wrinkled, dull gray-green leaves are clad in bristly hairs and carry the taste and fragrance of cucumber. Easy in poor, dry soils, drought-tolerant, a magnet for bees, and a self-seeder that returns to the garden year after year.