Brundall Mint

Description

Brundall Mint carries the refreshing character of a true British classic: a traditional spearmint known for its clean, mellow flavour, sweetly aromatic foliage, and deep roots in Norfolk’s culinary history. Named after the village of Brundall, this variety became especially significant in the 1960s, when Colman’s, in search of a mint with the clearest and strongest flavour for mint sauce, identified a plant growing in the Brundall garden of John Hemingway, then the company’s crops manager. From that local beginning, Brundall Mint became closely associated with the making of mint sauce and with the wider food heritage of Norfolk, a county that today still produces around three-quarters of the UK’s mint crop.

Its character is inseparable from that landscape. Norfolk’s long summer light, sandy free-draining soils, and coastal influence create conditions in which mint thrives, developing the freshness, bright green colour, and clear flavour for which this variety is known. Brundall Mint produces lush, slightly crinkled leaves with a soft spearmint scent that holds beautifully when chopped fresh or steeped in hot water. Its flavour is gentle rather than overpowering, making it ideal for mint sauce, summer teas, fresh salads, and lamb dishes. Yet it is perhaps at its most evocative when finely chopped and folded through steamed or buttered new potatoes, adding that subtle herbal brightness so long cherished in home kitchens and allotments across Britain.

Vigorous yet tidy in growth, Brundall Mint is a hardy and reliable variety, well suited to containers, raised beds, or border edges, where it will provide a continuous harvest through the growing season. Its story also continues in the present through a small network of Norfolk growers supplying the crop, with farms located close enough to the processing plant for the mint to be handled quickly and at its best; reported accounts note that only four farms around Norwich produce the mint used for the many millions of jars of mint sauce made each year. Brundall Mint is, then, more than a useful culinary herb: it is a living piece of British growing heritage, carrying with it the fragrance, restraint, and quiet comfort of seasonal cooking.