By Moonroot, blended by hand.
Valerian root tea has a reputation, and most of it's about the smell. Fair enough. But the plant is stranger than the reputation, the history is stranger still, and there's a reason we put only 0.30 g of it in a bag.
The plant, and the root that goes in the cup
Valerian, Valeriana officinalis, is a tall perennial that likes wet ground. Mrs Grieve's A Modern Herbal gives it three or four feet. It grows across Europe and northern Asia, and in England you find it in marshy thickets and along ditches and rivers.
The flowers are small and, in Grieve's words, "tinged with pink and flesh colour", carried in a broad flattened cluster on top of a hollow grooved stem. She calls their scent "peculiar, but not exactly unpleasant". That's generous of her. She calls the rest of the plant foetid.
Its old garden name is garden heliotrope. It isn't related to the true heliotrope, and none of the standard references explain how it picked the name up, so we'll leave that one alone.
The part that goes in a cup is underground. The European Pharmacopoeia defines valerian root as the rhizome, which is the short thick stem at the base of the plant, together with the roots and stolons growing off it, dried. Manitoba Agriculture tells growers to dig it after the first frost in the plant's second autumn.
The smell lives in the root, and mostly in the dried root. Fresh, it barely smells at all.
Manitoba Agriculture notes that the odour gets stronger as the root dries. The European Medicines Agency's assessment report puts that partly down to isovaleric acid, which forms as compounds called valepotriates break down. The same report calls valepotriates very unstable and says they degrade quickly in storage. So a loud jar tells you the root has been dried. It doesn't tell you it was dried well.
The names are old. Grieve records that valerian is supposed to be the phu of Dioscorides and Galen, a name later writers connected to the noise people make at a bad smell, and that Chaucer knew it as setewale. In Arabic it's usually hashishat al-hirr (حشيشة الهر), the cat's herb, or al-nardin (الناردين), which covers the whole genus. Our species is al-nardin al-makhzani (الناردين المخزني).
The cat's herb is a fair name. Why it's fair is still an open question.
In a 2022 study in BMC Biology, five of the six cats tested responded to dried valerian root. The root contains a compound called actinidine. The researchers didn't confirm that's what the cats were reacting to, and actinidine looks nothing like the nepetalactone in catnip.
What valerian root has been used for
Everything in this section is history, not advice, and none of it describes our tea.
The classical record is short. Dioscorides gives a plant he calls phou, growing in Pontus on the Black Sea coast, in a brief entry among the aromatic roots in Book One of De Materia Medica. He says it's also called wild nard. The root is pale and pleasantly scented. Dried and taken in drink it's warming and promotes urine, and it goes into antidotes.
No sedation. No sleep. Not a word.
Whether his phou is even our species is unsettled. Identifying plants in ancient texts is notoriously unreliable, and the plant Linnaeus later named Valeriana phu grows in northern Turkey, which is to say in Pontus.
That absence runs a long way. Henry Oakeley, who writes for the medicinal garden of the Royal College of Physicians in London, went through the standard herbals looking for sedation and didn't find it. Not in Fuchs (1553), Lobel (1576), Lyte (1578), Gerard (1633), Parkinson (1640), Coles (1657), Pomet (1712), Tournefort (1719–30) or Quincy (1718). Not in Dioscorides either.
Tournefort is the one that gets you. A full page on the uses of every valerian he knew, and nothing about calming anybody down.
Oakeley's conclusion is that for 1,800 years, before the last century, nobody thought valerian was a sedative at all.
That's one scholar reading printed European herbals rather than a complete history, and there are nineteenth-century exceptions to it. But the direction is right, and it's the opposite of what nearly everyone assumes about this root.
What the old books do talk about is the nerves, in the older sense of the word.
In 1592 a Neapolitan lawyer called Fabio Colonna, who had epilepsy, treated himself with valerian root and wrote it up in his book Phytobasanos. He'd found the plant through Dioscorides. The neurologist Mervyn Eadie went back over that story in Epilepsia in 2004.
Oakeley traces the rest. Haller recommended it in 1768 for irritability of the nervous system. Thomson's London Dispensatory of 1811 listed it as an antispasmodic and a stimulant. Lindley in 1838 listed it for epilepsy, chorea and hysteria. A stimulant: that's still how the pharmacy texts had it late in the nineteenth century.
The sedative reputation hardens in the twentieth. Grieve's herbal came out in 1931, written out of her work during the First World War, and it says that "during the recent War, when air-raids were a serious strain on the overwrought nerves of civilian men and women", valerian was given to counteract it. By 1936 Martindale's Extra Pharmacopoeia gave its only use as a sedative "in hysterical and neurotic conditions", and put the effect down to the smell.
In Europe it now has a formal standing. It's narrower than people think.
The European Medicines Agency's herbal monograph, adopted in 2016, accepts one dry ethanolic extract of the root as a "herbal medicinal product for the relief of mild nervous tension and sleep disorders", on the strength of clinical studies. It also lists several other preparations, a herbal tea among them, as a "traditional herbal medicinal product". That second category rests on thirty years of documented use rather than on trials.
None of it describes Quiet Moon. Those words belong to registered medicines that meet pharmaceutical quality rules and carry a national regulator's approval, and the EMA's own summary says food and food supplements don't follow the same criteria and puts them outside it. Quiet Moon is a food.
The trials themselves don't agree. In its 2017 guideline the American Academy of Sleep Medicine suggested clinicians not use valerian for chronic insomnia. A weak recommendation, on evidence it graded low quality.
What valerian root tea really smells and tastes like
Open a jar of dried valerian and you'll know before you lean in. Musky, sour, closer to old leather and wet earth than to anything from a garden. It fills the room.
Most people step back. We don't mind it. We actually quite like it, and we know we're in a minority there.
Hot water calms it right down. In Quiet Moon you have to go looking for it. Lift the saucer and it's chamomile and lavender that reach you first. The fruit turns the liquor a soft, faded violet-pink, pale enough that you can still see the bag through a glass.
The first sip, hot, is floral and round. Lemon balm keeps the top of the cup bright. There's a faint dry wood note at the back, like a pencil shaving.
Then let it cool. Bitterness hides in a hot cup and comes out around 40°C, so ten minutes after the kettle is when we judge a blend. The valerian comes up a little and you taste the earth in it. Our early versions without fruit went flat at that point and wanted honey. The berries, hibiscus and rosehip fixed that, and now a little tartness holds on to the last mouthful.
Valerian root has a pharmacopoeia standard too
Like chamomile, valerian has its own entry in the European Pharmacopoeia. Monograph 0453, Valerianae radix. For whole dried root it sets two minimums:
- at least 4 mL of essential oil per kilo
- at least 0.17% sesquiterpenic acids, expressed as valerenic acid
The essential oil is the volatile part, measured the same way as for chamomile. The sesquiterpenic acids are valerenic acid and two close relatives, hydroxyvalerenic and acetoxyvalerenic. The pharmacopoeia uses them as the root's chemical fingerprint. In plain terms, a kilo of good dried root should hold at least 1.7 g of them.
Cut root gets its own monograph, 2526, with lower minimums: 3 mL of oil per kilo and 0.10% acids. That's the one that applies to ours, because our valerian is cut.
Why no two valerians are alike
Valerian varies more than almost anything else we buy.
In 2004, researchers in Ottawa measured valerenic acid across 14 North American valerian products and published the results in the Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. They ran from 0.021 to 2.661 mg per gram. That's a spread of more than a hundredfold, with the lowest readings in a tincture and in teas. A survey of 31 Australian products in Pharmazie in 2001 found much the same, from under 0.01 to 6.32 mg per gram.
Some of that is the form a product takes. Some is processing. A lot of it starts with the plant itself.
Valerian comes in different chromosome counts. The basic set is seven. Wild plants in Poland are diploid, with 14, while the cultivated Polish landrace 'Lubelski' is tetraploid, with 28. A Polish group including Katarzyna Bączek and Zenon Węglarz has spent years measuring what that does to the root.
In their 2024 paper in Molecules, wild diploid populations averaged 0.013% sesquiterpenic acids. That's about a thirteenth of the pharmacopoeia's 0.17%. The cultivated tetraploids averaged 0.321%, nearly twice the minimum. Roughly a 25-fold gap between plants that could both go into a bag labelled valerian root.
The oil ran the other way. Wild plants averaged 7.62 mL per kilo, cultivated tetraploids 4.35, and one cultivated form came in at 3.87, under the 4 mL/kg minimum. So the plant with more oil can be the one with far fewer acids, and one good number on a certificate tells you very little about the other. An earlier study from the same group, in Plants in 2022, found wild populations ranging from 0.004% to 0.094% acids against 0.175% for the landrace.
When valerian root is dug, and how it's dried
The pharmacopoeia counts rhizome, roots and stolons together, but they aren't uniform. A 2018 imaging study by Penzkofer and colleagues in Plant Methods found the oil sitting towards the outside of the root. On average 43% of the oil droplets they counted were in the zone nearest the surface.
Manitoba Agriculture's advice is to clean the roots and dry them in shade with gentle airflow and low heat, under 40°C. Cut the larger pieces so they dry faster, because "rapid drying at a low temperature is necessary to prevent enzymatic and thermal decomposition". The same guidance suggests 0.8% valepotriates in the dried root as an acceptable minimum, which is its own view rather than a pharmacopoeia rule, and says they can reach 2%. It also calls them highly unstable, so how a root is processed and stored matters a great deal.
Some of the loudness of a valerian jar is those compounds breaking down. The loudest jar isn't automatically the best one.
Why there's only 0.30 g of valerian in a Quiet Moon bag
Each 2.80 g pyramid bag holds 0.30 g of cut valerian root. Chamomile is the base, then lemon balm, then valerian alongside our fruit blend of blackberry, raspberry, apple, strawberry, hibiscus and rosehip, and a little lavender at the end. Chamomile has a post of its own, and in this cup it does more of the talking than valerian does.
It took us three goes.
The first test cup had about three times today's valerian. Against the lavender it turned bitter and strange. We like bitter herbs so we drank it, but we wouldn't sell it. There was orange peel in the early versions too, for brightness, and it made the cup more bitter rather than less, so out it came. Cutting the valerian back fixed most of the problem and the fruit fixed the rest. At under a third of a gram you can still taste it at the back of the cup.
Now the part we'd rather say than hide. We haven't had our own valerian lab-tested, and we don't know the cultivar or the chromosome count of the root we buy. What we can tell you is what we check by hand, and that's below.
How to brew valerian tea: covered, and stop at five minutes
Pour 250 ml of water at 90°C over one bag, cover it with a saucer, leave it five minutes. Chamomile and lavender carry their scent in oils that drift off with the steam, and the saucer keeps them in the cup. Then take the bag out.
Leave it ten minutes instead and the earthy note takes over. The cup goes flat and woody and a bitterness settles on the back of your tongue. In our tests valerian was always the first thing to tip a cup that way. So if a cup tastes harsh, shorten the steep before you reach for the honey. There's more on method in our brewing guide.
We drink ours after dinner, with most of the evening still ahead. Skincare, then a book or a film, sometimes a slow stretch on the floor while it cools.
How to tell good dried valerian root from tired valerian
Good cut valerian is tan to light brown outside and paler where it's been cut. No dirt caught in the pieces, no dust at the bottom of the bag, and it smells strong the second you open it.
Old root goes quiet.
Our first valerian came from a herbal shop. The pieces were small and the bottom of the bag was dusty, so we passed. Now we only buy root we can see and smell before we pay. It has to be cut between 0.5 and 3.0 mm, never powdered, and dried to under 10% moisture. If a sample doesn't smell of much, it goes back.
You can check most of that yourself. Hold a Quiet Moon bag up to the light and you'll see pieces of chamomile flower, curled lemon balm leaf, small tan chips of root, a few purple lavender buds, dark flecks of fruit. That's why we use a clear mesh pyramid instead of a paper bag. There's room in it for the herbs to open once the water hits them, and you can watch them do it. Fine brown dust is the thing to watch for in any tea bag, because once a herb's been ground that small there's nothing left to check.
Questions people ask about valerian root
What is valerian root?
It's the underground part of Valeriana officinalis, a tall flowering perennial from Europe and northern Asia. The rhizome, roots and stolons are dug in the plant's second autumn, cleaned, cut and dried. It's the dried root, not the flowers or leaves, that goes into tea.
What does valerian tea taste like?
Woody and earthy, with a faint bitterness that grows the longer it steeps. On its own it's an acquired taste. In Quiet Moon it sits at the back of the cup, under the chamomile, lavender and fruit.
Why does valerian root smell so bad?
Because the smell builds as the root dries. The European Medicines Agency puts it partly down to isovaleric acid, released as compounds called valepotriates break down. Fresh root barely smells, and once it's brewed it softens into something woody and much quieter.
What is the pharmacopoeia standard for valerian root?
The European Pharmacopoeia requires whole dried valerian root to contain at least 4 mL of essential oil per kilo and at least 0.17% sesquiterpenic acids, expressed as valerenic acid. For cut root the minimums are 3 mL per kilo and 0.10%.
Does valerian tea have caffeine?
No. Valerian's a root, not a tea leaf, so it has no caffeine, and nor does anything else in Quiet Moon.
It's not a herb that wins you over in the jar, and that's part of why we kept it.
Quiet Moon is our evening blend, with valerian at the back of the cup. Meet Quiet Moon
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. Contains valerian, which may cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate machinery after drinking. Do not combine with alcohol or sedative medication. Not recommended during pregnancy or breastfeeding.