Creeping Thyme 7-28-23

One of the wonders of a garden is not just looking at it from afar but rather actually walking through it. In some of our gardens this is enhanced by a living garden infrastructure. One of my favorite ‘steppable’ plants is creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum). It grows well around the stepping stones.

Creeping thyme is a flowering subshrub in the mint family. The oval evergreen leaves are 3-8mm long. The scented pink-purple flowers are 4-6 mm long. It is a hardy plant that tolerates pedestrian traffic. It forms manlike plant that too from the nodes of squarish stems.

The leaves are in opposite pairs, nearly stalkless, with linear elliptic round-tipped blades and untoothed margins. The plant sends up erect flowering shoots in summer. The flowers have a tube-like calyx and an irregular straight-tubed, hairy corolla. The upper petal is notched and the lower one is larger than the two lateral petals and has three flattened lobes which form a lip. Each flower has four projecting stamens and two fused carpels.