Wild Bergamot: The Plant the Pawnee Sorted Four Ways

Western botany files this plant under one name. The Pawnee used four, and sorted them by how good they smelled.

Wild bergamot, Monarda fistulosa, is a mint that grows across most of North America, throws up ragged lavender flowerheads in midsummer, and has one of the longer and better documented records of human use of any plant on the continent. It is also, chemically, one of the stranger ones, and the reason the Pawnee bothered to distinguish four kinds turns out to be a real thing you can measure.

One plant, four names

Melvin Gilmore recorded the names in his 1919 survey for the Bureau of American Ethnology. The Dakota called it Heȟaka ta pezhuta, elk medicine, or Heȟaka ta wote, food of the elk. The Omaha-Ponca name was pezhe pa, bitter herb. The Pawnee had tsusahtu, ill smelling.

But that Pawnee name was only one of a set. Gilmore wrote that the Pawnee recognized four distinct forms of the plant, ranked by fragrance, from parakaha, the most fragrant, down through tsakus tawirat and tsostu to tsusahtu at the bottom. Then he added the line that makes it interesting: "All these four forms are included in our taxonomy under the name Monarda fistulosa."

That is a nineteenth-century ethnographer noticing that the people he was writing about had a finer-grained classification than his own discipline did.

They were right, and here is the chemistry

Wild bergamot is strongly chemotypic, which means plants of the same species growing in the same region can have substantially different essential oil profiles. This is not a subtle effect.

A 2021 study in Plants by Sims Lawson, Prabodh Satyal and William Setzer sampled wild M. fistulosa in south Alabama. Two of the three plants were thymol-dominant, at 54.3 and 62.2 percent thymol, with carvacrol around 6 percent. The third plant, growing in the same area, was a different chemotype: thymol down at 8.9 percent, and dominated instead by thymoquinone at 41.3 percent.

A separate European study of cultivated M. fistulosa found carvacrol leading at around 24 to 28 percent, with p-cymene, thymoquinone and gamma-terpinene behind it.

So wild bergamot reliably contains thymol and carvacrol, the same aromatic compounds that give oregano and thyme their character. What it does not have is a single fixed recipe. Two plants in one meadow can smell and test quite differently, which is precisely the distinction the Pawnee were making by nose, several centuries before anyone ran a gas chromatograph over it.

Who used it, and for what

The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service publishes a plant guide for wild bergamot, written by the ethnoecologist M. Kat Anderson, and its ethnobotanical section is unusually detailed for a federal document. The record it assembles covers at least ten nations.

The Tewa cooked it with meat as a seasoning, and separately dried and ground the plant into a powder. The Iroquois made a beverage from it. The Ojibwe put chewed leaves into the nostrils for headache and used the dried tops for colds, and placed leaves in warm water baths for babies. The Flambeau Ojibwe boiled the whole plant down to capture the volatile oil and inhaled it for bronchial complaints. The Menominee steeped the leaves and flowerheads as a tea. The Meskwaki combined it with other plants. The Hocak used it in the sweat bath. The Cherokee made a warm poultice of it for headache. The Teton Dakota boiled flowers and leaves together, which Gilmore recorded directly. The Blackfoot made a tea of the blossoms and leaves, and applied boiled leaves to the skin.

Two things stand out across that list. The first is how often it was inhaled or steamed rather than swallowed, which makes sense for a plant whose active fraction is a volatile oil. The second is that the uses cluster: aromatic, warming, applied to the head and the chest. Different nations, separated by a great deal of distance, arriving at similar places with the same plant.

There is a practical reason the preparations in that record lean toward steam and poultice rather than long boiling. Thymol and carvacrol are volatile, which is the whole point of them: they carry on the air, which is why you can smell this plant from several feet away on a hot afternoon. A preparation that captures the vapor keeps them. One that boils uncovered for an hour sends a good deal of the active fraction out of the pot and into the room. The Flambeau Ojibwe method of boiling the whole plant specifically to obtain and inhale the volatile oil is, read in that light, a fairly precise piece of extraction.

What to call it

This plant has a naming problem worth getting right, because two different species answer to the same common name.

Monarda fistulosa is wild bergamot. Monarda didyma is the scarlet one, also called Oswego tea. Both are commonly called bee balm, and the federal plant guide lists bee-balm as an alternative name for fistulosa, so it is not wrong. But in gardens and nurseries, an unqualified "bee balm" usually means the bright red didyma, which is a different plant with a different chemistry and a different history.

The Integrated Taxonomic Information System threads the needle neatly: fistulosa is wildbergamot beebalm, didyma is scarlet beebalm. If you are reading about one and looking at a photograph of the other, the color will tell you. Lavender and ragged is fistulosa. Bright scarlet is didyma.

And despite the name, neither is related to the bergamot orange that flavors Earl Grey. That is a citrus. The shared name is about scent, not family.

Common questions

Is wild bergamot a mint?
Yes. It is in the Lamiaceae, the mint family, and it has the family's square stems.

Is wild bergamot the same as bee balm?
Partly. Both Monarda fistulosa and Monarda didyma are called bee balm. Wild bergamot is fistulosa, with lavender flowers. The scarlet one is didyma.

Does it contain thymol?
Usually, and often as the dominant compound, but not always. The species is strongly chemotypic and some plants are thymoquinone-dominant instead.

Why did the Pawnee have four names for it?
They sorted it by fragrance, from most to least. Modern essential oil analysis shows the species genuinely does vary that much between individual plants.

Is it related to the bergamot in Earl Grey tea?
No. That is bergamot orange, a citrus. The two share a name because of a resemblance in scent.

Does it still grow wild?
Widely, across most of the continent, and it is a favorite of bees, butterflies and hummingbird clearwing moths. For more from the same record, see echinacea, yaupon holly and the history of herbal tinctures.

Sources

Anderson, M. Kat. Wild Bergamot, Monarda fistulosa L. USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Plant Guide, National Plant Data Center. View source

Lawson SK, Satyal P, Setzer WN. The Volatile Phytochemistry of Monarda Species Growing in South Alabama. Plants, vol. 10, no. 3, 2021, article 482. View source

Gilmore, Melvin R. Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region. Thirty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919, pp. 111 to 112. View source

Grzeszczuk M, Wesołowska A, Stefaniak A. Biological Value and Essential Oil Composition of Two Monarda Species Flowers. Acta Scientiarum Polonorum Hortorum Cultus, vol. 19, no. 4, 2020, pp. 105 to 119. View source

Integrated Taxonomic Information System. Monarda fistulosa, TSN 32284. View source

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This article is historical and educational and is not medical advice. Nothing here is intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before using any herb or dietary supplement.