By Moonroot, blended by hand.
Chamomile tea is the herbal tea nearly everyone's had, and plenty of people have only ever had a tired, hay-flavoured version of it. I grew up with a very different kind, and it's one of the reasons we started blending at all.
My grandmother kept hers on a big plate
My grandmother grew chamomile on her farm. She dried the flowers loose, spread out on a big plate in her kitchen, and you could smell them before you saw them.
They were a deeper yellow than anything I've found in a tea bag since, and a small spoonful made a strong cup. It took me years to realise most people had never had chamomile like that, and longer still to learn that a laboratory can now measure nearly everything she did by habit. That gap is a big part of why we started, and why chamomile's in three of our four blends.
Babunaj: the flower's Arabic names
In Arabic it's babunaj (بابونج), a name that came through the Persian babuna. Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, drawing on the classical dictionaries, treats it as a well-known plant and cites Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine for the three kinds, told apart by the colour of the flower. In old Yemen it was mu'nis, the companion, a name recorded in the lexicon Taj al-'Arus.
There's a second word worth knowing, because it isn't just another spelling. Babunaq (بابونق), with a q, is a North African term for the especially fragrant kind. Ibn al-Baytar, the Andalusian botanist who trained under Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati and worked at the Ayyubid court until his death in 1248, describes babunaq growing in the deserts of Barqa, in Egypt and in the Levant, and carried west to be planted around Toledo.
Medieval Arabic encyclopaedias also pass along a tradition, with no named authority behind it, that the sages of Egypt counted chamomile among the plants they held sacred to the sun. It turns up in that form in al-'Umari's Masalik al-absar. A good story, and we'll leave it at that.
The Greeks called it chamaimelon, earth apple. We don't have to guess why, because Pliny the Elder explains it himself in the Natural History: some call it chamaemelon, he writes, because it has the smell of an apple. Crush a fresh flower between your fingers and you'll agree with him.
What chamomile has been used for
The classical record is thinner than most wellness writing suggests. Pliny describes chamomile in Book 22 of the Natural History: where it grows, that it's gathered in spring on thin soils, that it goes into garlands, and that lozenges were made from the leaf, flower and root. Dioscorides gives it an entry in Book III of De Materia Medica, under the name anthemis. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health calls it an important medicinal herb in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, though the Egyptian end of that is repeated far more often than it is documented, and we've left it there.
Closer to home the record is better. A 2007 survey of the Ajloun Heights, published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology by Aburjai and colleagues, recorded local people infusing the flowers of golden chamomile, which they call baboonej, for coughs, colds and fever, for cramping and for wind. In many Levantine homes, mine included, it was also simply the glass that came round after a heavy dinner.
In England it became a nursery standby. When Beatrix Potter wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, Peter's mother puts him to bed after his bad evening and gives him a dose of camomile tea. In the Victorian language of flowers, in the edition illustrated by Kate Greenaway, camomile stands for energy in adversity.
Modern science has looked harder, and the honest summary is that the evidence is thin. NCCIH, in its 2024 review of the human studies, says there isn't sufficient reliable evidence to rate chamomile's clinical usefulness for any specific condition. On sleep it found very little information, with one study showing no benefit, and chamomile on its own hasn't been shown to help with infant colic.
What's inside the flower, and the standard it's measured against
The part that matters is the flower head, which botanists call the capitulum: a raised yellow dome of tiny florets ringed with white petals. The European Pharmacopoeia, the book of quality standards for medicinal ingredients sold in Europe, defines chamomile in monograph 0404 as exactly that, the dried flower heads, so stalks and leaves don't count.
Scattered over the florets are tiny glandular hairs, and that's where the essential oil is stored. The oil is a mix of named compounds, mainly α-bisabolol and two of its relatives, bisabolol oxides A and B. The flowers also hold a flavonoid called apigenin-7-glucoside, which stays in the plant material rather than the oil.
Then there's matricin, which explains the strangest thing about chamomile. Distil the flowers and the oil comes out a deep, inky blue. The blue is a compound called chamazulene, and it isn't in the fresh flower at all. According to ESCOP, the European Scientific Cooperative on Phytotherapy, it forms from matricin during distillation, which is why the oil is blue while your cup stays gold.
The pharmacopoeia grades chamomile on two of these, with two minimums for the dried flowers:
- at least 4 mL of essential oil per kilo
- at least 0.25% apigenin-7-glucoside, which works out at 2.5 g per kilo
Put plainly, distil a whole kilo of good chamomile and you should get at least 4 mL of oil, less than a teaspoon. The pharmacopoeia measures it by steam distillation, boiling the flowers and collecting whatever rises with the steam. If steam can carry the oil out of a flask, it can carry it out of an open cup.
Our grandmothers put a saucer on the pot for a reason.
Tea grade isn't pharmacy grade
Most people don't know that a box of chamomile sold as tea doesn't have to meet that standard. The tea trade works to its own, lower bar. The guideline used across the European herbal tea industry, set out in an annex to the compendium published by Tea & Herbal Infusions Europe, is reported at 2 mL of oil per kilo, half the pharmacopoeia minimum. We haven't been able to open the compendium ourselves. That figure is the one Pukka Herbs gave, citing the annex, when an Austrian consumer laboratory tested chamomile teas in 2020, and Austrian food law uses the same number.
How far apart are real products? In a 2025 study of 22 commercial chamomile teas, researchers at the University of Zagreb tested 11 sold loose and 11 in tea bags, and published the results in Acta Pharmaceutica.
- Essential oil ranged from 0.75 to 5.34 mL per kilo, a sevenfold spread between products all sold under the same name.
- The loose teas ran from 1.83 to 5.34 mL/kg. The tea bags ran from 0.75 to 2.15 mL/kg.
- Only five products met the pharmacopoeia's 4 mL/kg. All five were loose whole flowers. Not one tea bag did.
- On apigenin-7-glucoside, four of the 11 loose teas and one of the 11 tea bags reached 0.25%.
The authors put the gap down to processing. Crushing breaks the glands that hold the oil, and the bagged products also contained material that wasn't flower. Their conclusion was a preference for whole flowers.
That's the old habit of picking only the heads, written up in a pharmacy journal.
Part of the reason cheap chamomile is cheap is labour. In harvesting trials in Australia, picking heads by hand brought in between a third and half a kilo of dried flowers an hour. Cutting the whole plant is far faster, and it brings stalk and leaf in with the flowers.
Now the honest part. Our chamomile isn't whole and it isn't ground. It's cut to pieces between 0.5 and 3.0 mm, sized to sit loose in a pyramid bag with room to open. That puts us somewhere between the two groups in the Zagreb study, and we haven't had our own batch lab-tested yet, so we won't quote you a number we don't have.
Two chamomiles, and what drying does to the oil
Two different chamomiles grow in this part of the world, and the one most people picture isn't the one in Jordan's fields.
The chamomile in our blends is Matricaria chamomilla, German chamomile, the species behind the pharmacopoeia monograph and behind almost every study quoted above. The one that actually grows wild here is its smaller, all-gold cousin, Matricaria aurea. Herbarium sheets collected in Jordan between 1953 and 2013 place it at Dana, Azraq, Umm al-Jimal, Amman, Wadi al-Hasa and in the Gilead hills, several of them now held at Kew. It's the plant the Ajloun survey recorded, and a 2012 study of Jordanian Bedouin livestock-keepers in Pastoralism found 18 of 90 herders naming it unprompted. German chamomile, by contrast, has no wild collection records in Jordan at all.
So babunej in a Jordanian market can mean more than one plant. It's worth asking which one you're buying, and we ask.
Both flower in spring, which is when the heads can be gathered. The old way is to pick only the heads, in the morning once the dew has dried, and to dry them out of the sun. My grandmother's plate sat in her kitchen, not on the roof. There are numbers for this now, though they say something more interesting than "shade wins".
For German chamomile, the clearest data we've found is a 2021 trial in Egypt, published in Sustainability, which compared five drying methods. The amount of oil moved only a little. On the first harvest an enclosed solar dryer gave 0.50%, sun and shade came out about level at 0.39% and 0.37%, and the oven and microwave both gave 0.33%. The makeup of the oil moved far more. Bisabolol oxide A, the largest single part of the oil, made up about 50% of it after shade drying and 33% after open sun, the lowest of any method. And in every dried sample, the α-bisabolol of the fresh flower had gone, turned into its oxides as the heads dried.
Roman chamomile, a different species again, shows a much starker gap. In a 2004 study by Omidbaigi and colleagues, Roman chamomile dried in the shade held 1.9% essential oil, oven-dried at 40°C it held 0.9%, and sun-dried it held 0.4%.
So for our species, drying changes what the oil is made of more than how much of it there is. If you grow your own, pick the heads mid-morning, spread them in a single layer somewhere airy and out of direct sun, and leave them until they crumble when pressed, then keep them in a sealed glass jar away from light and heat.
What does chamomile tea taste like?
Good dried chamomile smells of honey and hay, with a little green apple underneath, and the yellow centres should still be bright.
Brewed, it turns the water a clear pale gold. The first sip is soft and sweet and round, with nothing sharp in it at all.
The cooled cup is where you find out what you've got. Good flowers stay sweet at 40°C, while stale chamomile goes flat and tastes of hay.
How to judge chamomile yourself
You don't need a lab, just your eyes, your nose and a cup.
- Look for flower, not stalk. Whole heads are easiest to judge. In cut chamomile you should still see pieces of yellow dome and white petal, and a lot of green stem means filler.
- Check the colour. Centres should be bright yellow and petals cream. Dull brown or grey usually means old stock or flowers dried in strong sun.
- Rub some between your fingers. It should smell of apple and honey. That smell is the essential oil the pharmacopoeia measures, and if there's no smell there's very little oil left.
- Look at the bottom of the bag. A pinch of dust is normal. A layer of fine brown powder means ground or crushed material, which is exactly where the Zagreb tea bags fell short.
- Cut a whole head in half. German chamomile is hollow inside the yellow dome, while look-alike mayweeds are solid, and scentless mayweed doesn't smell of apple. It's handy to know if you ever pick it wild.
- Taste it twice, once hot and once at about 40°C. Good flowers stay sweet as the cup cools.
Why it's in three of our blends, and how to brew it
In Quiet Moon, chamomile is 1.20 g of every 2.80 g bag, the largest single ingredient and four times the 0.30 g of valerian. That ratio is the decision the whole blend hangs on. Valerian root has one of the loudest smells in the herb cupboard, and our first test, with about three times today's valerian, turned bitter and strange. Bringing the valerian down while keeping the chamomile high is what made the cup drinkable. There's enough chamomile in the bag that valerian ends up as a low, woody note underneath it rather than the first thing you taste. The rest of the bag is lemon balm, our fruit blend and a little lavender, and we wrote about the valerian side in what valerian root tea really smells and tastes like.
In Inner Ease, chamomile is the base too, with lemon balm, spearmint, damask rose and a few threads of saffron on top of it. In After Ease it plays a supporting part: fennel, caraway and anise seeds lead that blend, and chamomile rounds off their edges so the cup doesn't taste like a spice drawer.
Same flower, three different jobs.
Whichever blend it's in, brew it the same way: 250 ml of water at 90°C, a saucer over the cup and five minutes. When you lift the saucer, tip the drops on its underside back into the cup, because that condensation rose with the steam and is carrying some of the oil. Much longer than five minutes and chamomile loses its sweetness and turns flat. Our brewing guide goes through the method in full.
Who should skip it
Chamomile's in the daisy family. If you're allergic to ragweed, daisies, chrysanthemums or marigolds, avoid it.
Questions people ask about chamomile
What is chamomile called in Arabic?
Babunaj (بابونج), from the Persian babuna. In old Yemen it was mu'nis, the companion. Babunaq, with a q, is a separate North African word for the especially fragrant kind, not just another spelling of the same name.
Why is chamomile oil blue?
Because of chamazulene, which forms from a compound called matricin when chamomile is distilled. The fresh flowers aren't blue, and neither is a brewed cup. The blue only appears in the oil.
What's the difference between German and Roman chamomile?
They're different plants. German chamomile, Matricaria chamomilla, is the one most tea is made from, and its yellow centre is hollow inside. Roman chamomile, Chamaemelum nobile, is a low-growing perennial whose centre is solid.
Which chamomile grows wild in Jordan?
Golden chamomile, Matricaria aurea, not the German chamomile most tea is made from. It's recorded from Dana, Azraq, Amman and the Ajloun hills, and it's one of the plants sold locally as babunej.
Does chamomile have caffeine?
No. Chamomile is a flower, not a tea leaf, so it has no caffeine. All four of our blends are caffeine-free.
It's the flower everyone thinks they know, until they've had a good one.
Inner Ease is built on chamomile, with rose and a few threads of saffron on top. Meet Inner Ease
Safety. Herbal infusion. Not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. If you are pregnant, breastfeeding, taking medication, preparing for surgery, or managing a medical condition, consult a healthcare professional before use. Keep out of reach of children.
Contains chamomile. Avoid if allergic to ragweed, daisies, chrysanthemums or marigolds.