Bencao House
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Food as medicine

Chrysanthemum

菊花Jú Huā

四气 Nature
Cool · 凉
五味 Flavour
Sweet · Bitter
归经 Channels
Lung · Liver
Shared-origin list
2002 catalogue · 菊花

Chrysanthemum flower is slightly cold, sweet and bitter, and belongs to the Lung and Liver channels. It is the flower Chinese offices drink all afternoon, usually alongside goji, for eyes that ache after a screen. The best-known grade, 杭白菊, grows an hour from our clinic in Hangzhou and is picked in November.

A dozen small dried chrysanthemum flower heads, pale gold, photographed on warm plaster.
Chrysanthemum morifolium · Dried flower head or unopened bud

Chrysanthemum morifolium

四气 · Nature

  1. cold
  2. cool
  3. neutral
  4. warm
  5. hot
Cools gently

五味 · Flavour

sour
Gathers and holdsLiver
bitter
Drains and driesHeart
sweet
Fills, slows, harmonisesSpleen
pungent
Disperses and movesLung
salty
Softens and sends downKidney
归经 Channels
Lung · Liver
Part used
Dried flower head or unopened bud
Shared-origin list
2002 catalogue · 菊花

In the canon

What the texts say

Chrysanthemum was a garden flower and a poem before it was ever an entry in a herbal, which is unusual for anything on this list. It is recorded in the Shennong Bencao Jing, compiled around 200 CE, among the 120 substances that book files in its upper class — the group it describes as mild enough to be taken over long stretches of time. That classification is the reason Chinese offices drink it by the litre and think nothing of it.

Shennong Bencao JingThe Divine Husbandman’s Classic of Materia Medicac. 200 CE

Bitter and level. It governs wind and dizziness in the head, and eyes that are swollen and sore. Taken over a long time it lightens the body.

Upper class, among the herbs

Li Shizhen filed it among the herbs when he printed the Bencao Gangmu in 1596 — 1,892 entries gathered over twenty-seven years — and spent most of his entry on a complaint that is still worth reading. Sellers, he wrote, were passing off the wrong flower. The one wanted is the sweet-tasting cultivated chrysanthemum. The bitter wild flower, 野菊花 yějúhuā, is a colder and rougher item and belongs in a different drawer. Four hundred years later both are still on the shelf and still confused, so it is worth saying plainly: this entry is the cultivated flower, and nothing on this page is about the wild one.

The best-known formula containing it is younger than either book. Wu Jutong published 桑菊饮 sāng jú yǐn, the mulberry-and-chrysanthemum drink, in his Wenbing Tiaobian of 1798, for the light, early, upper-body picture that the entry before this one describes. The two flowers and leaves are steeped together and drunk warm, briefly, and then put away. Chinese shops sell the pair already mixed in a bag.

Grade matters here more than in most entries. 杭白菊 Hángbáijú, the Hangzhou white chrysanthemum, is grown around Tongxiang, an hour from our consulting room, and picked in November when the field turns white overnight. The first picking is of unopened buds, 胎菊 tāijú, which are smaller, sweeter and more expensive; the open heads that follow are what most shops sell. Both are the same flower. The buds are simply the picking that happened first.

In a kitchen

How it is actually used

Chrysanthemum is not cooked and it is not eaten. It is steeped, refilled two or three times through an afternoon, and thrown out at the end of the day. In Chinese offices the standard cup is chrysanthemum with goji: the flower cool and light for the head, the berries neutral and sweet underneath it, and the two together the plainest thing anyone does about a long day of screens.

Chrysanthemum and goji water

Two cups, refilled twice10 minutes

3 g · about 10 buds
Dried chrysanthemum, buds if you can get them
10 g · 1 tbsp
Dried goji berries
500 ml · 2 cups
Water, boiled and then stood
5 g · 1 tsp
Rock sugar, optional
  1. Boil the water and take it off the heat. Let it stand three or four minutes, until it has fallen to roughly 85°C — the point where the steam has thinned but the pot is still too hot to hold.
  2. Rinse the flowers with a splash of that water and pour it away. Dried flowers carry field dust, and the first pour is not for drinking.
  3. Put the flowers and the berries in a warmed pot or a lidded cup, pour the water over, and cover it for four minutes. The liquid should come out pale gold, not brown.
  4. Drink it warm and refill the same flowers twice more across the afternoon. Eat the berries at the end; they will have gone soft and are the best part of the cup.

A rolling boil is the mistake everyone makes. It turns the petals brown and the water bitter, and the cup that comes out tastes of stewed hay. If your water is boiling when it hits the flowers, wait. Buds hold up better than open heads to a second and third refill.

The other domestic use is the pairing with mulberry leaf from the previous entry, a pinch of each steeped the same way for a week or two when the air turns dry. Nobody in China drinks chrysanthemum all year round. It belongs to the warm end of spring and to the stretch of any season when your head feels hot and your eyes feel scratchy, and it goes back in the cupboard afterwards.

Who it is for

Who it suits, and who it does not

Cool and light, aimed at the head and the eyes. Chinese medicine reads the eyes as the outward opening of the Liver, and it reads a hot, tight head at the end of a long day as heat that has risen and not come back down. Chrysanthemum is the mildest thing in the cupboard for that picture, and the wrong thing entirely for its opposite.

Tends to suit

  • Eyes that are hot, dry and gritty after eight hours of a screen.
  • A head that feels tight and full at the temples by late afternoon.
  • Someone who runs warm, flushes easily, and prefers a cold room.
  • The windy weeks of spring, when the eyes water and itch outdoors.

Tends not to suit

  • Anyone who runs cold, with cold hands and feet in a warm room.
  • A weak appetite and loose stools that cold drinks make worse.
  • Anyone who reacts to daisies, ragweed, marigold or feverfew.
  • Blood pressure that already runs low enough to leave you light-headed.

Honestly

What to know before you start

The reading

Chrysanthemum suits some people and not others

This page describes a food. It cannot tell you whether it belongs in your week, because it knows nothing about how you sleep, eat or feel the cold. A reading does: thirty questions, one photograph of your tongue, and a document written in English by a physician licensed in China for US $39, sent within 48 hours.

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