Chamomile Care: Watering, Support and Keeping the Plants Open

The two plants need different treatment

Before anything else, work out which chamomile you are looking after, because the care is genuinely different. The German kind is an annual that grows into an upright, feathery, branching bush 20 to 30 inches (50 to 75 cm) tall, flowers for six to ten weeks, sets seed and dies. The Roman kind is a low evergreen perennial that creeps at four to six inches (10 to 15 cm), roots as it spreads and comes back every year.

You can tell them apart without waiting for flowers. German chamomile grows a single upright stem that branches upwards and its foliage is thin and thread like. Roman chamomile makes a dense low cushion of finer, softer, grayer foliage that smells strongly when you brush a hand across it. If yours is standing up in the middle of the bed, it is the tea plant. If it is hugging the ground, it is the lawn plant.

Water rarely, and only at the base

Chamomile is drought tolerant once its roots are down, which for a spring sowing is about six weeks after emergence. From that point water only when the plants wilt at midday and are still limp in the cool of the evening. Midday wilt on a hot day that recovers by evening is normal and needs nothing.

Overwatering is the more common mistake and it shows as soft floppy growth, yellowing lower foliage and, before long, mildew. In containers the balance is different: an eight inch pot of chamomile in full sun in high summer dries out daily, and there you do water on a schedule. Check by weight, not by looking at the surface.

Water the soil, not the plant. Wetting that fine feathery foliage in the evening leaves it damp all night, which is how powdery mildew and gray rot get their start in a crowded stand.

1. Water in the morning Morning watering lets the foliage dry within the hour. Evening watering on chamomile is the single easiest way to invite mildew, because the leaves are so finely divided that they hold moisture for hours.
2. Soak, then leave it When you do water, give it enough to wet the soil six inches (15 cm) down, then leave it several days. Frequent light watering keeps the roots shallow and makes the plant less able to cope with the next hot spell.
3. Mulch instead of watering An inch (2.5 cm) of gravel or coarse grit around the plants keeps the roots cool and the soil evenly moist without wetting the crown. Avoid soft mulches piled against the stem, which rot it.

Do not feed it

This goes against instinct, but chamomile grown lean flowers far better than chamomile grown well. Nitrogen produces a plant with lush foliage, weak hollow stems and a scattering of flowers, and the flowers it does make are lower in the aromatic oils that give the tea its character. On any reasonable garden soil, give it nothing at all for the whole season.

If you are growing in containers, where the compost is exhausted after a couple of months, a very dilute balanced feed once a month from the start of flowering is enough. Half the strength stated on the bottle. Anything more and the plant grows out of flowering and into leaf.

If your chamomile is tall, dark green and leafy with few flowers, it is being fed or the ground is too rich. There is no cure this season beyond harvesting what flowers you get. Next year sow it on the poorest sunniest bit of ground you have.

Support, or accept the flop

German chamomile is top heavy in flower and it will fall over. The stems are hollow and once a plant is carrying a hundred open flowers, one thunderstorm lays the whole thing flat. On the ground the flowers get splashed with soil, they are unpleasant to pick and they rot quickly.

The tidy answer is to support it early. Push twiggy sticks in among the plants, or run two rounds of string on short canes at eight inches (20 cm) and sixteen inches (40 cm), when the plants are about a foot (30 cm) tall. Doing this after the plants have already flopped never really works, because the stems set into their fallen shape.

1. Support before it needs it Put the string or brushwood in when the plants are a foot (30 cm) tall and still standing on their own. They grow up through the support and hold themselves.
2. Grow in a block, not a single row A block three or four plants wide, at the proper spacing, holds itself up far better than a single row, because the plants lean on each other. A lone row in an open site always falls.
3. Cut back a flopped plant If a plant has gone down and the flowering flush is finishing anyway, shear it back by half. In warm weather it will push a second flush of shoots, and those flower on shorter, sturdier stems.

Keeping the plants open

Airflow through the plant is the main disease control for chamomile. Everything that goes wrong in a wet season, gray rot on the flowers, mildew on the foliage, aphids massed in the tips, gets worse when the plants are crowded and the middle of the stand never dries.

That means holding to the eight to ten inch (20 to 25 cm) spacing even when it feels wasteful, pulling out weeds while they are small, and thinning out any stems that have snapped or died back so they do not sit rotting inside the plant. In a wet spell, walk through and take out the worst congestion by hand rather than waiting to see what happens.

Note the date the plants first flopped and what the weather was doing. If it happens two years running in the same bed, the ground is too rich or too sheltered, and moving the sowing to a leaner, breezier spot fixes it permanently.

Looking after a Roman chamomile mat

A creeping chamomile lawn or path infill needs different work: it needs weeding and shearing, not watering and feeding. Through its first season the mat is open and weeds establish in the gaps faster than the chamomile can close them, so hand weeding every couple of weeks over that first summer decides whether you get a lawn or a weed patch.

Once it has knitted, shear it over two or three times a season with hand shears at about two inches (5 cm), which keeps it dense and removes the spent flowers. Do not mow it close like grass, and do not walk on it heavily in winter when it is wet, because the crowns bruise and open up bare patches that take a whole season to close.