The chamomile tea jar is filling up. These are chamomile flowers drying in my very basic solar drier made of a dark coloured enamel plate covered with a pyrex pie dish. We have a dehydrator but I don’t use it often, and for small quantities like this, the pie dish in the sun on the back deck railing works fine.
I have all of ONE chamomile plant, in a hanging basket. I’ll save some seed and plant two or three next year, but they flower so prolifically that in a little retrosuburban garden and if you only drink chamomile tea occasionally, one is probably all you need. These are the new flowers today after the pie dish was filled yesterday.
I’m not an opponent of Western pharmaceuticals. Like most essential services in a late capitalist economy, every bit of the field that can be profiteered will be, but the basic science behind it is one of the wonders of the Enlightenment. I fear where we will be without antibiotics, anaesthetics, insulin, epipens, ventolin, vaccines, let alone the entire intensive care pharmacy. I struck that theme in ‘470‘ – how would my characters deal with something as common and, nowadays worrisome but not usually panic stations, as a childhood asthma attack?
And after my cold last week (thank you, almost totally recovered now), I started to think about how useful it is to have basic medicinals growing where I can just go out and pick, even when I am quarantining so as not to pass my germs on, even if pharmaceuticals get tangled up in the multiple crises of late capitalism.
So, a series on the easy to grow, multiple-use herbs I grow at least partly for their medicinal use. A retrosuburbia garden medicine chest.
Matricaria recuitta chamomilla, family Asteraceae (the daisy family), German chamomile
This is the annual chamomile. There is also Chamaemelum nobile, or Roman chamomile, the perennial one. It has some of the same but also many different active ingredients and medicinal uses, and I’ll write another post about it another time.
The annual one grows from seed, planted early spring and flowering all summer. The seed is tiny. It self seeds easily, but with limited space, I only want a couple so I plant seeds in a fine seed raising mix, barely covering them, and pot the seedlings on. The plant is about 30 to 50 cm tall, multistemmed and spindly and prone to wind damage if it’s out in the open too much. It flowers better in full sun and it likes good drainage, but otherwise isn’t fussy. Mine is growing well this year in a hanging basket, but other years I’ve grown it just as a mid-height garden plant in amongst the vegetables.
The flowers are the harvest, and it’s easy to just pinch them off when they are fully open, but they come on every day so it’s good to have your chamomile somewhere easy to access and remember it. You can make tea from the fresh flowers, or dry them for the tea jar for winter.
I’ve only ever known chamomile tea as a bedtime soother, when sleep feels urgently desired but far away. And my research found some decent support for this use as a mild sedative or tranquillizer, not so much to treat insomnia but to treat restless sleep and jazzed up nerves. It’s also good for calming gastrointestinal troubles, for adults and colicky babies, so nausea, wind, diarrhoea.
But my research found it is also surprisingly good as a wound wash – antimicrobial, drying and healing. (There’s some good experiments done on people getting tattoos removed by dermabrasion, which I squirm to think about). So think nappy rash, cracked nipples, grazes, burns, and (since it’s safe to drink), for gum and mouth wounds.
There’s a good review that covers most of the medicinal use research I found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2995283/.
You will find the rest of this series by clicking the tag Medicinals.
So that’s one of a couple of dozen, in no particular order, for my garden medicine chest. Would it be in yours? What would you have as number two?
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