Chamomile Dyers Seed, Anthemus tinctoria

Dyer’s Chamomile, or Golden Marguerite, is used principally as a dye plant. As another of its names – Yellow Chamomile – suggests, the flowers can be used to make a yellow dye. Colours range from bright to an olive or brownish yellow, depending on the mordant or fixing agent being used.

GROW: A hardy but short-lived perennial, with an upright habit and bright yellow daisy-like flowers. The small seeds should be sown thinly in seed trays from early Spring. They germinate easily and can be planted out when large enough to handle. The plants are hardy so can be planted before the last frost. Cuttings can be taken and will root readily

HARVEST: harvest the flowers every two to three weeks. When the flowers first open they are quite small but increase in size and weight, so we try to only pick the more mature flowers. Once harvested, we dry them in a herb dryer and keep them in storage jars. Drying usually takes several hours and then it is best to leave the dryer switched off overnight before giving it an additional hour the next day. If the flowers are stored even very slightly damp they can become mouldy. It usually takes two or more harvests to fill one large storage jar, which provides enough dyestuff for a 10 litre dye bath. The stems and leaves of the plant also provide some dyestuff, so we sometimes cut the plants back at the end of the season and dry these too.
A word of warning about storing Chamomile flowers in poorly sealed containers. The mature flower heads contain a lot of nutritious seed material. One year we stored mature dry plants in paper sacks inside snap-top plastic storage boxes. But this attracted the attention of “Pantry” or “Larder” beetles which caused an infestation! We now only store dried flowers in fully airtight containers.

USE: This is not a chamomile used for culinary purposes, but according to Plants for a Future, it has myriad potential medicinal uses: “The whole plant is antispasmodic, diaphoretic, emetic, emmenagogue and vesicant. It is used internally as a tea, which can be made either from the flowers or the whole plant.