Fennel vs Mint: The Aromatic Conclusion

You met the screaming mint. You admired the sassy fennel. Here's what you didn't know about how their pasts intertwined.

They were neighbours, but not the ones who evolved heartwarming camarederie from ground proximity. They resembled instead the scramble that you envision when an anthill is kicked over by callous human boots. They were like the painted wolves in one episode of David Attenborough’s gruesomely honest Dynasties series, where an ageing mother and her pack faces the snarling wrath of her daughter and her starving grandchildren — a death match amid dwindling natural resources.

A fennel bulb twirled its aniseedy flowers in annoyance. Each perfumed white petal emanated the icy, intoxicating herbal smell humans today associate with Tiger Balm. It sat watching the horizon from a vegetable patch spread across the top a rolling hill. The skies reflected a backdrop of serene blue on a cloudless day. The perfectly ridged, stout and cylindrical stem of the fennel grew taller and taller, tapering upwards to form a thicket of fur-like wispy fronds. But right next to it is the source of its chagrin: the spaghetti-thin herbaceous stems of a family of mint. Day by day, the mint family grew upwards with the ebullient vim of countless generations of fruit flies that emerge from a towering human fruit bowl of sweet rot and neglect.

The smell of peppermint wafting from the raspy leaves sliced through the nose-like receptors of unsuspecting pollinators like invisible razors, driving them away with the power of asexual propagation, and sheer greed. Even though mint plants can reproduce through delicate flowers like the fennel and sustain measured growth, many, thanks to the human gardener’s intervention, choose to grow ad infinitum through scattered stem cuttings. These, the green spaghetti-like stems one sees above ground, are called runners. Rude, pestilent strands that could drive neighbouring plants into the ground through several bulldozing growth marathons.

Some mint stems are speed runners that choke out innocent by-plants by making them feel a cocktail of sensory hell as they raze their line of vision with flashes of green. Friction burn, carbon dioxide depletion and menthol fumes of death, attack those delicate herbs in the periphery. They fall in succession like all the pretty maids in the row referenced in the grotesque nursery rhyme Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary. The relay of ruthless murders are more metaphorically akin to the bloodier French Revolution version of the same beloved children’s song, where heads of the ruling class roll off the guillotines into the mass graves across 18th century Paris.

---

It’s madness, I know, the way humans bury their unsavoury truths through collective cultural amnesia. You could imagine a human mother saying “Yeah, what else on earth could those pretty maids be other than sweet orange and yellow marigolds, child? Now, go back to sleep. ChatGPT and Google are lying robot voices, honey. Hush, put the tab away now,” before muttering to herself: “NOTHING gets past those little brains anymore. It was only a song God**mni*?!!!?!!! There’s no need for it to reek of death!”

---

Fennel hated the smell of peppermint. The thick, cloying scent and highly volatile fumes sprayed out from every part of the proliferating leaf glands. The mint family puffed out toxic clouds every time their reproductive urges effervesced like bubbles exploding on the surface of a boiling pot of reducing stock. Every Lady bug patron Fennel hosted despised it too, and were actually repelled by it. Fennel remembered one Lady Bug who clambered into one of the forks where two of its stems intersected. The insect flattened its saucer-like chin onto one of the walls and began whirring out insults directed towards the noxious clouds it escaped from.

“My dear Fennel, your aroma reminds me of meadows in the field, of flowers arriving from grand lineages of wondrous herbs and sharp spices from the East. Fennel, embracing your walls lulls me into a childlike slumber, like a baby falling asleep to wafts of its mother’s comforting bosom. You are my sanctuary from those death fumes,” the insect sang in a voice that sounded like the one a human makes by absent-mindedly rubbing two Lego blocks together. Hollow, metallic, plastic.

But Fennel itself, despite its dislike for the mint family’s pungent signature and their insatiable space invasion, was not in danger next to mint. Even if the mint family’s underground pipelines, known as rhizomes, were notorious for colonising the ground horizontally below ground too, they never dared to approach Fennel’s vertical roots that plunged downwards towards Earth’s magmatic core.

Fennel had its own secret and deadly arsenal. Its bulbous, child-like appearance which portrayed a picture of sweet innocence belied its true nature. Fennel is a true soloist in the plant world and prefers a patch of its own. This is due to the deadly phytochemicals it nurtures in its shapely womb. When these molecules are released into the ground, they can poison the top soil, making it deadly to many other plant species, especially those belonging to the hallucinogenic nightshade family, such as potato, tomato and aubergine. Mint plants can loosely survive fennel’s toxicity, since they are consumed by their own flagrant growing spree. However, mint plants are not immune to the growth-stunting effects of Fennels’s chemicals, which can seep through their roots, rhizomes and runners. And here, we are only talking about the passive effects they face from merely existing next to Fennel’s chemical factory-filled body.

---

It was an eerily peaceful day. The mint family had a productive mid-morning, having made several expansionist plans at their weekly sunrise congregation, where each member discussed important matters concerning their spreading influence and wealth preservation. They often huddled closely, sipping their slowly evaporating balls of dew, while the sun slowly rose to the blue skies and excited their inner chloroplasts, or manufacturing hubs that are fuelled by the intensity of light radiation.

Each young mint leaf had its own dreams, which it either chooses to reveal at these meetings with elder family family members or simply bury within the confines of its own, maze-like mind. One leaf was sick and tired of her family’s traditionalist ideals, which emphasised serial aggressive takeovers of land, often at the expense of the new neighbours she befriended. “We are no more than angry developers,” she once voiced out at one family meeting, to which several elder leaves almost synchronously spat out their morning dew. “We owe it to the bees, the butterflies and the mint moths, young one, these insects depend on our existence. More importantly, humans depend on us, harvest us in the bucketloads. In return, they grant us immortality and help us prosper far and wide. We must progress our generational valour for we represent the undying power of resilience and community spirit,” the oldest leaf of the family voiced its response gently, pushing itself forward to look the questioning youngster in her eyes.

“But grandpapa, we kill. We takeover, then we kill. I’ve befriended many a crop around us and all of them are slowly starved to death within weeks due to our resource-hoarding and overconsumption. Do you know how painful it is to know someone’s life story one day, only to find out that while they have been developing a beautiful rapport with you, your family members have been slowly sucking away their nutrients like vampiric parasites. This is why no one likes us anymore, we are pests. Ugly, immoral PESTS!” The mint leaf let out a soul-crushing scream that instantly stirred awake the Fennel and its countless sleeping Lady Bug guests. The Fennel watched as the young mint literally tore herself away from her family’s bush, landing on the ground with her stem still intact, a couple of her cousins still attached to her stalks. She picked herself up and began walking away from the patch, farther and farther away from Fennel’s line of sight.

She rolled down the hill they were stationed on and continued her journey, eventually disappearing into the horizon, from her family’s line of sight. The young mint leaf knew that she would harm and eventually kill if she grew next to other plant species, so she was determined to end up in the mint farm close to her village. At least this way, she thought to herself, she placed herself within an institution that harvested her kind en masse for supermarkets and human consumption. There would be little chance for mint in a farm to actively harm other plants, as they would be too busy regenerating their rapidly harvested sections. Little did the young escaped mint know that one day, she would end up in ASDA, and then on the window sill of a fatefully neglectful human owner.

---

Fennel’s rising rage reached a crescendo. The constant noise from its mint neighbours, their incessant chatter and imbecilic laughter, disrupted Fennel’s highly sensitive fronds which during childhood grew up attuned to the lilting classical music the gardener played several times during the day, usually repeating blissful concertos played by Hilary Hahn. What was once an atmosphere of gentle harmonies and the gurgles of the nearby fountain quickly turned into a ruckus of vastly differentiated pitches represented by wildly distinct voices. Some mint leaves were shrill, some produced loud burp-like noises, some leaves produced trombone-like grunts, all during unpredictable times throughout the day. Lady Bugs begged Fennel daily to do something about the noise pollution and the noxious gases that originated from the mint family, daily.

One eerily peaceful mid-morning, Fennel woke up and finally decided to put an end to this un-neighbourly saga.

Fennel meditated upon the sun, drawing in the full extent of its electromagnetic powers which then churned out tonnes of the powerful, allelopathic toxins which swirled around in its engorged womb. Fennel let out a bone-chilling incantation which reverberated through the mint family, vibrating its young top leaves. One young mint leaf screamed hoarsely until it eventually lost its voice entirely.

With a decisive swish of one of its wand-like stalks which acted like a lever connected to a valve, Fennel masterfully unleashed these deadly chemicals from her bulbous undersides into the soil. Like rapacious hyenas, these phytotoxic jets of chemicals swarmed the neighbouring mint family’s ripening rhizomes and root network underground, burning them from the outside in. These dense molecules were very swiftly swallowed up by the mint family’s waterlogged stems, an osmotic curse which meant that the plants were essentially glugging up Fennel’s cell-killing juices which were force-fed into them from the ground up.

Poison reached every inch of the mint family, and within days, annihilated them. Dead, the mint family ended up in a dried up black heap, as though they were struck by the lighting bolt of one of the thunder gods: Indra, Thor or Zeus. “I killed the avocado tree. I killed the bumbling brassicas. I killed every potato I encountered in my life. If you disturb my peace, you shall simply DIE!” The Fennel, sweat beads on its face, carved out a spine-tingling grimace on its face, which enhanced the manic stare which now glassed over its hauntingly beautiful eyes. The Fennel was now possessed with anger, malice and revenge and will continue on a soil rampage for several days before the plant cooled off. Still residing on the Fennel, four Lady Bugs watched this biological warfare unfold in grave horror. Joining their hooked palms in unison, they launched off Fennel’s feverish body, buzzing away into the blue horizon. They vowed never to return.

The aromatic battle between Fennel and mint concludes with a swish and a loud bang symbolising chemical warfare. Original hand-drawn artwork by the author Rasika Sittamparam.