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There are few small pleasures to match stepping out of the back door on a warm July afternoon, pinching a few daisy-like flowers from a patch of chamomile, and carrying that scent back indoors on your fingers. German chamomile, Matricaria chamomilla, is the one to grow if you want a genuine tea crop rather than a pretty lawn substitute. It is a hardy annual, quick from seed, generous with its blooms, and utterly at home among the looser, softer planting that suits a British cottage garden.
It earns its place for wildlife too. The flowers are shallow and open, so they suit the smaller pollinators that struggle with deep or double blooms: hoverflies, solitary bees, small wasps and the little beetles that trundle about in late summer. Leave a few stems to set seed and the finches will find them in autumn. Grow enough and you can please both the bees and the teapot.
Chamomile wants sun and drainage above all else. A south-facing border, a raised bed, or a large pot on a warm patio will all do, provided the roots never sit wet through winter. It will sulk in heavy clay and rot in boggy ground.
You have two sensible windows for sowing outdoors. The first is late April to mid-May, once the soil has warmed and the worst of the frosts have passed. The second is late August to early September, which gives you sturdy little plants to overwinter in milder districts; they will flower earlier the following summer, often from late May.
Plants reach roughly 40–60cm, with delicate feathery foliage and a scent that is part apple, part hay. If you garden on clay, work in a few handfuls of grit or compost before sowing, and consider starting them in modules instead.
Timing matters more than most gardeners realise. The essential oils that give chamomile its calming, apple-sweet character build through the morning and are at their richest in the early afternoon. Pick too soon after dawn, while dew still clings, and you will be drying a lot of water and very little scent.
Wait for a dry, bright day. Ideally, harvest between about 11am and 2pm, once any moisture has lifted from the petals. This also means your flowers go into the drying tray already dry, which is the single best defence against mould.
Pick when the flowers are fully open, with the yellow centre still domed and firm and the white petals just beginning to reflex backwards and droop slightly. At that stage the oil content is peaking. Flowers past their best, with petals turning brown or the centre going conical and hollow, have lost much of their virtue.
Chamomile dries quickly and easily, but it is easily ruined by heat. Anything above about 40°C drives off the volatile oils and leaves you with something that smells of dusty hay, so keep it out of the oven and away from radiators and hot windowsills.
Spread the flowers in a single layer on a muslin-covered tray, a clean tea towel or a sheet of paper, somewhere warm, dark and well ventilated: an airing cupboard, a spare room, or a shelf away from direct sun. Turn them very gently once a day. They will be crisp in roughly five to ten days, depending on the weather. A properly dried flower should crumble between your fingers with no softness at the base.
Store in a small airtight jar, kept in the dark, and label it with the date. Whole dried flowers hold their fragrance far better than crushed ones, so leave them intact until you are ready to brew. Used within a year, they will still smell sweetly of apples when you open the lid.
For one mug, use a heaped teaspoon of dried flowers, or two if you like it fuller-bodied. Pour on water that has just come off the boil and cooled for a minute or so, around 95°C. Cover the mug while it steeps, so the aromatic oils stay in the cup rather than drifting up into the kitchen.
Five minutes is about right: long enough to extract the flavour, short enough to avoid the faintly bitter edge that over-steeping brings. Strain, and add a little honey if you like, though a good batch needs nothing at all. A slice of lemon will flatten the apple notes, so save it for another day.
The real pleasure of this is not really the drink. It is the small loop of attention it creates: sowing in spring, watching the hoverflies work the flowers in high summer, harvesting in the warm middle of the day, and filling the airing cupboard with trays that scent the whole landing for a fortnight. In January, when the garden is bare and the light is thin, you open a jar and pour hot water over a summer afternoon you saved on purpose. That is the whole of slow living, really, and it fits in a mug.
The Quiet Rowan shares practical, down-to-earth guidance on seasonal cottage gardening, british wildlife and slow nature living for readers across the UK.
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