Meet the Herb: Calendula — How We Grow & Dry the Golden Flower at InVine Botanicals (Tallahassee FL)

If you've ever seen a balm with little golden-orange flecks in it, there's a good chance you were looking at calendula. It's one of our favorite flowers to grow here at InVine Botanicals, in Tallahassee, Florida. So let's get to know it.

Calendula, sometimes called pot marigold, is a cheerful daisy-like flower with golden and deep-orange petals. It's been a staple of cottage and herb gardens for centuries, grown for its color and its long, generous bloom. We grow ours right here in our Tallahassee garden, where it blooms happily in the Florida sun and keeps flowering for months if you keep picking it.

It grows alongside the rest of our herbs, the rosemary, the mints, lemon balm, and basil, all tended by hand from seed. Calendula is also one of the easiest, most rewarding flowers a home gardener can grow, which is part of why it's been beloved in herb gardens for so long. When it comes time to harvest, we let each flower open fully, then pick the blooms by hand, one at a time, at their peak.

It's slow work, but picking by hand keeps the flowers whole and keeps the plant producing more blooms all season long. The fresh-picked flowers come straight indoors, in a basket, while they're still bright and full of color. Then, like all of our botanicals, the calendula is dried slowly.

The whole flowers are laid out in a single layer on screen racks. They dry for several days in our climate-controlled room, around seventy-six degrees, at low humidity, and in the dark, which is exactly what protects that signature golden-orange color. The calendula dries right alongside our roses and herbs, all part of the same season's harvest coming in off the beds together.

Once it's fully dry, the calendula is slow-infused into organic oil for six to eight weeks, in cool, dark conditions. The flowers slowly give their color to the oil, turning it a soft, sunny gold. That calendula-infused oil is one of the botanicals that goes into our Bug Bite Balm, blended with the other garden herbs we grow.

It's also part of our Nature's Finest Trio gift set. In every one, the calendula is a whole flower we grew, harvested, and dried ourselves, not an extract bought in. And that's really the whole idea.

The calendula in our balms started as a seed in our garden, opened into a golden flower, and was picked and dried by hand before it ever reached the oil. So that's calendula, the golden flower of the herb garden, grown right here in Tallahassee. You can find the balms it goes into at invinebotanicals dot com.

Thanks for spending a little time in the garden with us.