Wow, beautiful patch of RW, Wendy! I thought it was HBB agastache too, in front of it. I don't have a lot of experience with monarda. Grew some about 100 years ago and it did well for a year or two then disappeared on me. I was new to gardening so I figured it was me! Then I grew some monarda (didyma?) from seed. It bloomed in pink and purple and at first I was thrilled with the colors, but really, the blooms were not that full and looked... dirty. The color just wasn't good. I ripped it all out last fall and composted. Growth was great but not overly aggressive - spread about a foot in diameter per clump in three years - and it was easy to remove. I'm hoping to get some more this year. I really love pink (and I LOVED the purple!) but I might go with red. I'm planning a red/orange bed and I'm thinking of monarda for this bed. Fun thread! Great photos (love the moth - they are so cool!) - and would love to see more photos! Dee

drsoidberg, the kinds of wasps that (I believe) the others are talking about are not parasitoids, but predators. For example, paper wasps and mud daubers will snatch a caterpillar, sting to paralyze it, then carry it off to the nest where it's sealed inside with an egg from the wasp. Wasp larvae will then be able to feed on live (though sedated) caterpiller until ready to emerge as an adult. Yellow jackets, too, are predators and will feed directly on caterpillars and other insects. The much smaller parasitic wasps are the ones that lay their eggs on or under the skin of feeding caterpillars. Their larvae feed on the living caterpillar from the inside out, emerging only when ready to fly away as adults. In my gardens, the hummingbirds really enjoy the monarda, and I'd not remove it primarily because of that. But, a diversity of insects is healthy, too.

Given the highly variable nature both of the different varieties, hybrid and otherwise, and our different aesthetic judgments of smell and flavor, I might recommend smelling out your favorites at local nurseries and/or botanical gardens. Personally, my favorite Monarda for tea is a fistulosa that I grew from a cutting from the side of a bike path in a nature reserve north of Kansas City. It has a mellow black tea aroma with light oregano-thyme accents. A close friend, however, much prefers the fistulosa he grew from seeds from a prairie south of KC, with a strong camphor-mint-cardamom fragrance. And for show in the garden, I'm kind of partial to M. bradburiana, a low-growing, early-blooming and shade-tolerant species. While the scarlet-flowered M. didyma varieties like Jacob Kline may tend to have a more traditional "Earl Grey tea" flavor, there's nothing to say that you won't find one of the others to be your own personal favorite. Furthermore, for that bergamot-orange flavor, I find orange mint (Mentha citrata) to be a much more prolific and strongly-flavored substitute, although it does lack the showier flowers of Monarda. Have fun searching!

Ty terrene. I certainly feel lucky to have gotten this place. It's been alot of work buying a property considered a fixer upper but I have few complaints. If anything all the work inside and out has given me back a little of my sanity. My only dissapointment being that much of the gardens were raided by certain neighbors after the passing of the original owners. A majority of the gardens were chock full of holes. The daughter of the owners even went as far as to call the cops on the one neighbor and had them dig the plants back up to return them. I think the worst culprit was the landscaper across the street. The lady behind me said she saw him over here with half a dozen of his guys all pushing wheelbarrows. I heard tales of a wonderous rose garden with dozens of species but needless to say there are none now. Fortunately for me many of the species that weren't here the first year have returned this year when I used the compost I collected while giving the place it's first major weeding in what must have been several years. After churning in first year compost into a once empty mound garden I now have a dozen examples of perrenials that didn't exist my first season. Oh how my sanity returns to me. Best of all .... the lovely fragrance of bee balm decayed into the soil. Reminds me of home.