Well, here we are! The beginning of our Flower Friday posts for the season! For the uninitiated among you, we use our Friday posts to focus on various flowers from our gardens.
Our Flower Fridays are rarely our most popular posts, but we know a lot of you really like them. Flowers are a vital aspect of growing food, helping us attract pollinators to our gardens to ensure solid fruiting across monoecious plants. Not just that, but they help us attract dragonflies, which in turn naturally reduces our mosquito populations! Flowers provide many important roles for our gardens, our mental health and for our general northern living. To us, our flowers are of equal importance to our food gardens and that’s why we put a lot of focus on them.
In these posts, we typically do a deep-dive on a single flower variety and discuss the history, etymology, medicinal uses, culinary applications, regional significance and other interesting things about that flower. As always, we appreciate the support you offer us as we put a lot of work into making these posts both interesting and informative.
Today’s focus is going to be Chamomile! The modern term Chamomile dates back to the 13th century and is originally derived from Latin and French. The original Greek word “chamaimelon” essentially meant “earth apple.” Given its daisy-like looks, you’d be correct if you deduced Chamomile to be from the vast Asteraceae genus.
An amazing northern grower, chamomile is often one of our earliest flowers of the season and thus always holds a special place in our flower line up. If there were a commercial crop that Alaska and other northern regions could solidly produce for the world, Chamomile would have to be on that short list. It produces heavily and intensely throughout our entire growing season, taking full advantage of our midnight sun. It’s biggest fault is a lack of industrial harvesting mechanisms, requiring labor intensive manual harvesting of the flowers. We’ll tell you, it’s a lot of work even for a personal supply!
Chamomile is actually comprised of quite a few different varieties, all of which are broadly referred to as chamomile. (Even the vastly common “pineapple weed” is often called chamomile!) However, two major varieties are largely grown for the commercial and home use applications, though. The German variety (Matricaria recutita) and Roman/English varieties (Chamaemelum nobile) are the most common types to be grown for general harvest.
While many believe that chamomile has strong naturopathic medicinal properties, the modern scientific outlook is somewhat skeptical on that front. No particularly powerful phytochemicals or biological compounds are (yet) known to be produced by chamomile. Despite this, chamomile has consistently been a focus across a wide variety of various medical studies for just that potential.
Current evidence does show promise for Chamomile’s anti-inflammatory and anti-microbial properties, supporting its use in things like mouthwash. It is also actively being studied for its potential role in anti-anxiety applications and many have reported a “calming effect” when consuming chamomile. Some use it to treat a variety of digestive issues.
Overall, chamomile is far more popular as a general flavor additive. Many know it for its use in herbal teas, but chamomile has been used for millennia to flavor beer and other beverages. Chamomile pre-dates even hops as an ingredient in various ales, although it still has popular application to this day with many herbal-focused brews. In the brewing world, a beer that is primarily flavored with herbal additives is known as a Gruit. Chamomile is also used as an herbal agent in mouthwash, soaps and various cosmetics.
The most common chamomile harvest is for the flowers, which are then frequently dried for longer term storage. Chamomile can also be grown as a “sacrificial plant” as aphids will often prey upon it, occupying their interests instead of your more prized plants. Chamomile will continue to produce flowers once harvested, typically throughout our short growing season.
This season, we’re growing both English and German varieties. We’re excited to truly compare the two for their strengths and tastes. We really want to know if we strongly prefer one or the other!
