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Calendula flowers.

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You can get good calendula flowers in bulk from the UK.

Pic: Bought vs. picked calendula flowers.
Here's a pic of two different batches of Calendula flowers:
1) Organic herb trading co. dried herb, from Spain, and 2) mine.

You can see that my calendula flowers are a little brighter, especially in the orange and green parts. But for bought calendula this is excellent quality: the color difference is small, and the smell of the bought flowers is not too bad. Nice!

I'm making another batch of calendula salve as I write this (earlier this week, as you read this), with the bought herb.

I'll be getting year-old calendula from a local pal in January; I'll put up a three-way comparison of color then.

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Related entries: Calendula salve - Yellow flowers: Calendula

Comments

Very interesting blog. Have you noticed your calendula flowers going different colours? The first seeds I sowed produced very yellow flowers with dark brown, nearly black centres. I collected the seed from that and spread it around along with some of the older seed left over from the previous year. This year I have orange flowers with similar orange centres along side the yellow-with-dark-centres.

I guess there's no medical use for dyer's chamomile (does what it says on the packet)? It seems a shame, since I've not done any dyeing. I have hundreds of yellow flower heads off of one very large plant that has been flowering for months on end.

Calendulas usually regress to smaller, lighter-colored flowers, in seeds. Funny that you got darker flowers from your seed, really.
Dyer's chamomile, Anthemis tinctoria, is only mentioned in the US Disp, and there it's a one-liner: "A. tinctoria L. is occasionally employed as a tonic and vermifuge in Europe."
Yes, it's used in dyeing things. Yellow, I think, but it could have been light green, too.