We love Calendula, the English Marigold. Orange beauty, it brightens the veggie patch, flower gardens and other corners. The Calendula name comes from the word Calendar and I think it is because it flowers every month of the year! Easy to cultivate, we use it as companion plant, in salad, tea and skin ointments.
Culture
Calendula is an annual, rustic plant, forming 40 to 60cm compact plants.
Large yellow to orange flowers will bloom all year round and massively from October to frosts.
Seed in autumn or spring in full sun or partially shadowed. They grow anywhere, even in poor soil, even in our dry and frosty climate. After flowering, the heads become seed heads, easy to snap off for esthetics or keep for seeds.
They self seeds easily and can be replanted where wanted. They are also very easy to pull out when we need the space, they won’t come back from the roots.
Companion plant
Calendula attracts and feeds insects when no other flowers are available thereby enhancing biodiversity.
They attracts natural predators to aphids (ladybirds, hoverflies…);
Their roots hold good nematodes for a healthy soil.
We cultivate calendula in the veggie garden, one plant in each raised bed to attract favourable insects.
They also grow everywhere in our flower beds, filling in the gaps and adding their joyful colours.
How we use it
Comestible plant, we add petals to salads to brighten them up.
I add some petals in the “garden tea” but not leaves as I find them quite bitter.
I make a beauty oil: I harvest nice fresh parts of the plant, leaves, flowers and stalks, cut roughly and macerate for several weeks in a variety of oils (sweet almond, grapeseed, avocado, apricot kernel…). Then it is simply strained and funneled into a glass jar with a dropper lid. I used to make a cream with beeswax but it was longer and quite messy so I simplified to oil. Of course we can add essential oils to perfume and help our skin, lavender, geranium or rose. I sometimes mix cistus leaves and flowers into the oil maceration, cistus is good for aging skin!
Medicinal uses
Its Latin name is calendula officinalis and for good reason. My Maria Treben’s Cures book (Steyr: Ennsthaler, 2000) has 2 pages on it. Here is a summary:
Depurative, blood-cleansing, purifying, stimulating for blood, antiseptic. Also the plant of the skin, wonderful for wound healing.
Drink two cups per day of calendula herbal tea to help cure jaundice, wounds, digestive illnesses, intestine or liver or stomach pain, colitis, dropsy, and hematuria. Calendula herbal tea is ideal to help with all viral and bacterial infections. Also effective vermifuge and laxative. Calendula herbal tea applied on eyes helps vision.
Some recent study show good results with cancer, skin cancer, breast cancer, stomach and ulcers. In this case, fresh plant juice is more effective.
In cream or oil ointment, calendula is wonderful for skin. From post-chirurgical wounds to fungus, blues, strains, scars, piles and varicose veins, sunburns, dryness, age pigmentation, also purulent or swelling wounds.
Calendula TM is a powerful antiseptic and helps skin recovery. It can be used on any wounds and post-natal or postoperative situations: infant umbilicus, lesions, sore…
Good to know and beautiful to grow!
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