Could you please give me the botanical name for the English mint used in mint sauce and for cooking new peas and new potatoes?

A magazine in Canada is recommending spearmint which is the flavouring in chewing gum which is horrid and not the right mint. But I have found it impossible to find the correct name, My mint came from England and doesn't even look like spearmint. It is very odd that a plant which is used so much is so difficult to track down.

And if it is spearmint, what is the mint used in chwing gum? They are not the same.

Many thanks.

Peppermint (Mentha piperata) is generally used to make mint sauce.

I can show it to you.

That is the one used in Australia and the middle East
Most mints are a bit hard to hold down botanically and many tend not to come true from seed. It has more of an ovate(ish) semi-serrated leaf although very similar in taste to spearmint.

[Edited to remove long unnecessary link]

The mint illustrated looks to me very much like the one previously known as Mentha cordifolia, though it could be any of the Moroccan/Egyptian varieties of M spicata (viridis) . The problem for amateurs is that "Spearmint" doesn't taste like spearmint. Try and sell it to them under that name and they will reject it, but if you tell them that it's "Moroccan", they will buy it

In forty years of this job, I have never known anyone attempt to make mint sauce out of Mentha piperata more than once. However, chacun a son gout or whatever.
Anthony