Calendula: History and Traditional Use

Table of Contents

1. Botany, Origins, and Two Different "Marigolds"
2. The Calendar Flower and Mary's Gold: What the Names Say
3. Antiquity: Caltha, Klymenon, and the Problem of Identification
4. From Hildegard to Culpeper: The Medieval and Renaissance Herbals
5. Pot Marigold: Broths, Cheese, and the Poor Man's Saffron
6. Nineteenth-Century Medicine: Eclectics, Homeopaths, and the Battlefield Story
7. Inside the Petal: Carotenoids, Triterpenoid Esters, and the Essential Oil
8. Monographs and Trials: Commission E, the EMA, and Radiotherapy Skin Care
9. Tradition, Evidence, and the Daisy-Family Allergy: Calendula Today
10. Key Research Papers
11. Connections
12. Featured Videos

Botany, Origins, and Two Different "Marigolds"

Calendula officinalis is a short-lived, aromatic annual (sometimes a short-lived perennial in mild climates) of the daisy family, Asteraceae, with sticky, slightly hairy leaves and flower heads from pale lemon to deep orange. What looks like one flower is, as in every daisy, a community: a ring of strap-shaped "ray florets" — the petals, in everyday language — around a disc of tiny tubular ones. The ray florets and the dried whole heads have always been the medicinal and culinary part. The genus holds roughly fifteen to twenty species, most of them wild plants of the Mediterranean, North Africa and western Asia; C. officinalis is the only one that became a garden plant almost everywhere.

Where it came from is, honestly, unknown. The plant has been cultivated so long, and escapes from gardens so readily, that no botanist can point to a wild population and call it the original. The usual verdict is that it is probably native to southern Europe or the wider Mediterranean, and older authorities disagreed even about that: the 1898 King's American Dispensatory called it a native of "South Europe and the Orient," while John Uri Lloyd, writing in 1911, placed it in eastern Asia "from Japan to India." The disagreement itself is the useful fact: calendula's wild home was erased by the success of its cultivation.

One confusion needs clearing up before any history can begin. The bedding "marigolds" of modern garden centres — French and African marigolds — are Tagetes, a completely different genus native to the Americas that reached Europe only after the sixteenth-century Spanish voyages. They share the English name and the colour, nothing else. Every medieval European reference to "marigold" therefore means Calendula, because Tagetes had not yet arrived; from the late 1500s onward a reader must check. Gerard's 1597 Herball already describes the "African Marigold" separately from the garden marigold, and by 1898 King's was complaining that French and African marigolds were being sold as substitutes and that "much of the fluid preparations of calendula" were made from the wrong plant. "Pot marigold" was, in part, a name to keep the kitchen-and-medicine plant apart from its ornamental namesakes.

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The Calendar Flower and Mary's Gold: What the Names Say

Both names are little stories about how people saw the plant. Calendula is medieval Latin, a diminutive of calendae, the first day of the Roman month — the root of "calendar." The herbalists' own explanation was that the flower could be found in bloom at the calends of nearly every month: Gerard wrote in 1597 that it "is to be seene to flower in the Calends of almost everie moneth." So Calendula means roughly "the little calendar." The name is not classical: the historians Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti trace its adoption in the pharmacological literature to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, around the time of the illustrated Tractatus de herbis. Earlier medieval sources used other names — solsequium, "sun-follower," for the way the heads open in the morning and turn with the light, and, in Hildegard of Bingen's German, ringula, the ancestor of the modern German Ringelblume, "little-ring flower," after its curled, ring-shaped seeds.

The English name is younger and more devotional. Old English knew the flower simply as golde, "gold." In the late fourteenth century, in Middle English, that became marigold or Mary gold, and the Middle English Dictionary records the fuller form seint marie gold, "Saint Mary's gold." The "Mary" is almost certainly the Virgin Mary: in late-medieval England golden flowers of this kind were associated with her, and the plant bloomed through the many Marian feast days of the church calendar. That is as far as the documentary record goes. The often-repeated claim that Hildegard of Bingen coined "Mary's gold" cannot be right — the name is English, not German, and appears two centuries after her death — and the legends of Mary wearing the flower are later pious embroidery. What is solid is simpler: for six centuries English speakers have called this flower the gold that belongs to Mary.

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Antiquity: Caltha, Klymenon, and the Problem of Identification

Ancient writers described plants in a few words and no pictures, so matching their names to living species is a specialist art, and calendula shows how uncertain it can be. Roman poets and agricultural writers — Virgil, Columella and Pliny the Elder in the first century CE — mention a strong-smelling yellow flower called caltha, which many later botanists took to be the pot marigold. The identification is plausible and cannot be proved. On the Greek side, Touwaide and Appetiti note that the plant is absent from the Hippocratic writings of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and appears first in Theophrastus, the "father of botany," around 300 BCE, and there only as a small garland plant raised from seed. Dioscorides, whose first-century De Materia Medica was Europe's pharmacy textbook for fifteen hundred years, gives a short description and a handful of uses — a draught for coughing up blood and for bowel complaints, an external application for nosebleed, and a poultice for fresh wounds — and explains them through the humoral theory of his day as the work of a "cooling and astringent" plant. Whether Dioscorides' plant is really Calendula officinalis is, again, a later inference, not a certainty.

Two cautions follow. The widely repeated statement that calendula was "used by the ancient Egyptians" has no identifiable textual basis and is omitted here; and claims of deep antiquity in India usually confuse it with Tagetes, the American marigold that reached Asia only after 1500 and is the temple garland flower today. What can be said with confidence is modest: by the Roman period a golden garden flower that was probably calendula was grown for garlands and given a small place in medicine.

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From Hildegard to Culpeper: The Medieval and Renaissance Herbals

The first unmistakable European description belongs to the twelfth century. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), the Benedictine abbess of Rupertsberg on the Rhine, included the plant under the name ringula in her Physica, the natural-history and medical work she wrote in the 1150s. Following the humoral theory of the age — health as a balance of hot, cold, moist and dry — she classed it as cold and moist, and recommended preparations for people and for cattle, including for illness after spoiled food. The name calendula itself was current at the medical school of Salerno in the same period, and by the fourteenth century the plant was firmly in the Latin pharmacopoeial literature. Household use is harder to see, but Lloyd, summarising the older English sources in 1911, records hot decoctions to promote sweating in fevers, the juice for sore eyes, and an application to warts.

Printing changed everything. Leonhart Fuchs gave calendula an entry in his illustrated De historia stirpium of 1542: he reversed Dioscorides and called the plant warming and drying, recommended it for absent menstruation and as a mouthwash for toothache, and noted two non-medical uses that would recur for centuries — as a condiment, and as a rinse to make hair blond. John Gerard's Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) gave the plant far more room: ten kinds of marigold, the double garden forms illustrated, the name explained from the calends, and new preparations — a conserve of the flowers and a distilled water. His most quoted passage is about the kitchen, not the pharmacy (next section).

Nicholas Culpeper's English Physitian (1652, enlarged 1653, still in print as Culpeper's Complete Herbal) gives the plant in his brisk astrological style. Marigolds were "so plentiful in every garden, and so well known that they need no description." They were "an herb of the Sun, and under Leo"; they "strengthen the heart exceedingly"; they were "a little less effectual in the small-pox and measles than saffron" (a revealing comparison, as we will see); the juice of the leaves with vinegar "instantly gives ease" to hot swellings; and the flowers, fresh or dried, were "much used in possets, broths, and drink, as a comforter of the heart and spirits." The astrology and the heart-strengthening belong to their century; but notice how much is external and anti-inflammatory — swelling, heat, skin — because that is the thread that survives.

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Pot Marigold: Broths, Cheese, and the Poor Man's Saffron

For most of its European history calendula was at least as much a food colour as a medicine, and the two roles were never far apart. Gerard reported that the dried yellow florets were kept through the year "to put into brothes, in Phisicall potions," and that in "Dutchland" (the German lands and the Low Countries) dried marigolds were sold by the barrel and went into almost every good broth. That is the origin of the British name pot marigold: the flower that goes in the pot. English cooks stewed the petals with spinach and put them in puddings and oatmeal. The practical point was colour. Saffron, the dried stigmas of the crocus, was Europe's most expensive spice, and dried calendula petals gave a broth or custard a similar golden tint for almost nothing — hence "poor man's saffron," and hence Culpeper's instinctive comparison of the two plants. The colour is real; the flavour is not saffron's.

The same pigments coloured the dairy. Butter and cheese made from the milk of grass-fed cows in early summer are naturally yellow, because grass is rich in the orange-yellow carotenoids that pass into milk fat; winter milk, and skimmed milk, gives pale cheese. Food historians describe seventeenth-century English cheesemakers adding saffron, marigold petals or carrot juice to restore the summer colour (annatto, the tropical seed dye in most orange cheese today, came later), and butter was tinted the same way. It is a small irony of chemistry that what calendula supplied — carotenoid pigment — is exactly what the grass had supplied in June. Beyond the kitchen, the flowers gave a yellow-to-tan dye for wool and, as Fuchs recorded, a rinse for lightening hair.

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Nineteenth-Century Medicine: Eclectics, Homeopaths, and the Battlefield Story

Calendula crossed the Atlantic early. Lloyd, citing John Josselyn's account of New England plants, notes that colonists had carried the garden marigold to North America before 1670. In the nineteenth century it found two enthusiastic professional constituencies there. The first was the Eclectic school — the American botanical physicians whose reference work, King's American Dispensatory (1898 edition by Felter and Lloyd), described calendula as "slightly stimulant and diaphoretic," used "for similar purposes with saffron, but less active," but reserved its real praise for the tincture as a wound dressing. It quotes a Dr William J. Clary: "As a local remedy after surgical operations, it has no equal in Materia Medica," especially for lacerated wounds. Eclectics also applied it to ulcers, eczematous skin, conjunctivitis and varicose veins, and the plant was then official in the United States Pharmacopoeia, as a tincture and a fluid extract.

The second constituency was homeopathy, which adopted calendula tincture in an entirely un-homeopathic way — undiluted, on the wound — and made it the school's standard external dressing for cuts and lacerations. An 1881 article in The Homoeopathic Physician by C. Carleton Smith, "Calendula: Its Place in Homœopathic Therapeutics," describes it as the topical remedy "in all incised and lacerated wounds" and credits it with preventing or greatly reducing suppuration in mechanical injuries. This is the milieu in which calendula ointment became a household staple on both sides of the Atlantic, and why so many of today's calendula creams descend from homeopathic and anthroposophic pharmacies.

Now the battlefield story. It is said in dozens of books that calendula dressed wounds in the American Civil War (1861–1865) and again in the First World War. This article could not find a primary source for either claim — no surgeon's manual, supply list or hospital record — and the secondary accounts contradict one another about who used it and how. What is documented is the context that makes the story plausible: calendula tincture was a recognised surgical dressing among Eclectic and homeopathic physicians of the Civil War generation, and accounts of the First World War say that when imported drugs ran short medics turned to garden herbs with antiseptic reputations, marigold among them — again without a paper trail this article could follow. The honest summary is that calendula was probably used on some wounded soldiers in both wars, by some practitioners; that it was a standard military dressing is not established.

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Inside the Petal: Carotenoids, Triterpenoid Esters, and the Essential Oil

The scientific chapter opens with the colour. The orange and yellow of the ray florets comes from carotenoids — the same family of fat-soluble pigments as the beta-carotene of carrots and the lutein of kale — and the classic analysis is Trevor Goodwin's 1954 paper in the Biochemical Journal, part of his long series "Studies in carotenogenesis," which worked out the carotenoid make-up of the petals; the pigments named since include flavoxanthin and auroxanthin alongside more familiar ones such as lutein. These are the compounds that once tinted the Dutch broths and the English cheese. Calendula also yields a small amount of essential oil, which gives the fresh flowers their faintly resinous smell but is a minor player medicinally.

The compounds that matter for the skin are less colourful. From the 1960s the Polish biochemist Zofia Kasprzyk and colleagues published a series of papers in Phytochemistry on the triterpenes of calendula flowers — the saponins (glycosides of oleanolic acid) in 1967, the free triterpene alcohols in 1968 — laying out a chemistry invisible to earlier generations. Triterpenoids are waxy thirty-carbon molecules that plants build from the same starting material as cholesterol; calendula makes a distinctive set, including faradiol (also found in coltsfoot and sunflower), arnidiol, calenduladiol and taraxasterol. The decisive step came in 1994, when Roberto Della Loggia's group in Trieste fractionated a calendula extract guided by an anti-inflammatory bioassay and showed that the triterpenoids — above all the fatty-acid esters of faradiol — were the flowers' principal anti-inflammatory constituents. Three years later Karin Zitterl-Eglseer and colleagues in Vienna isolated the genuine faradiol monoesters (the myristate and the palmitate) intact for the first time and showed that each had the same dose-dependent anti-swelling activity in the mouse-ear test. Since then the faradiol ester content has become the marker by which good calendula flower is standardised.

Put plainly: tradition said "marigold cools a hot swelling" and chemistry replied "the faradiol esters reduce experimental oedema." That is a real correspondence, unusual for a folk remedy — and a laboratory finding in animal skin, not a clinical proof.

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Monographs and Trials: Commission E, the EMA, and Radiotherapy Skin Care

Germany was the first country to formalise calendula's traditional standing. Commission E, the expert panel that reviewed herbal medicines for the German health authority, published its monograph on Calendulae flos (calendula flower) in the Bundesanzeiger, the federal gazette, on 13 March 1986, approving it for inflammation of the mouth and throat lining and, externally, for poorly healing wounds; a separate monograph on the leafy herb, Calendulae herba, was negative. The European Union followed with a Community herbal monograph adopted by the European Medicines Agency's Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products (HMPC) on 6 March 2008 and revised on 14 June 2018. Under the EU's "traditional use" category — resting on at least thirty years of documented safe use rather than on trials — calendula flower is accepted for minor skin inflammation such as sunburn, as an aid in healing minor wounds, and for minor inflammation of the mouth and throat, from the age of six (skin) or twelve (mouth). The dried flower also has its own European Pharmacopoeia monograph, which sets the standard a pharmaceutical-grade flower must meet.

The clinical record is thinner than the regulatory one, but it contains one landmark. In 2004 Pascal Pommier and colleagues in Lyon published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology a phase III randomised trial of 254 women receiving radiotherapy after breast-cancer surgery: those who applied a calendula ointment to the treated skin had significantly less moderate-or-severe radiation dermatitis than those using trolamine, the standard emollient (41 per cent against 63 per cent), and less pain. Later work has been more sobering. A Swedish randomised, blinded trial reported by Lena Sharp and colleagues in 2013 found no difference between a calendula cream and a plain aqueous cream, and a 2015 review by Kodiyan and Amber concluded that the evidence was mixed and too limited to recommend calendula routinely. In wound care generally, a 2008 systematic review found only weak evidence, and the 2019 review by Givol and colleagues found encouraging animal and early clinical results — faster passage through the inflammatory phase, more granulation tissue — but called for larger trials. Single small trials have supported calendula ointment for infant nappy (diaper) dermatitis and a calendula mouthwash for radiation-induced mouth soreness. The picture is consistent: a gentle, plausible, low-risk topical with one strong trial, several weak ones, and no settled verdict.

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Tradition, Evidence, and the Daisy-Family Allergy: Calendula Today

Few herbs show such a clean line between what tradition claimed and what survived scrutiny. The heart-strengthening, the astrology, the fever sweats and the wart cures fell away; the poultice on hot, sore or broken skin, recorded under Dioscorides' name and repeated by Culpeper and the Eclectics, is exactly the use the chemists explained and the regulators accepted. Calendula is grown commercially today, in central and eastern Europe and elsewhere, for the pharmaceutical and cosmetic trade; the plant itself remains what Culpeper said it was — in every garden, needing no description — and the petals still go into salads and rice for colour, the poor man's saffron four centuries on.

The modern chapter also added the one caution the old herbals never mention. Calendula belongs to the Asteraceae, the daisy family, with arnica, chamomile, echinacea, ragweed and the Tagetes marigolds, and people sensitised to that family can develop allergic contact dermatitis from calendula preparations. Austrian dermatologists documented sensitisation to arnica and marigold in a 2001 paper pointedly titled "The seamy side of natural medicines," and the EU monograph makes Asteraceae hypersensitivity a formal contraindication. The reaction is uncommon, but it is why a patch test on the forearm is sensible before first use, and why anyone with a known ragweed or chamomile allergy should be careful. For everyone else the balance of history and evidence is the one the hub page draws: a soothing, well-tolerated topical for minor skin irritation, with a genuinely long tradition behind it and a modest, unfinished body of science in front of it.

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Key Research Papers

The list covers the pharmacological reviews of calendula, the chemistry that identified its pigments and anti-inflammatory triterpenoid esters, the principal clinical trials and systematic reviews, and the allergy literature. Historical primary texts (Dioscorides, Hildegard, Fuchs, Gerard, Culpeper, King's, the 1881 homeopathic article) are named in the article, not cited here.

1. Arora D, Rani A, Sharma A (2013). A review on phytochemistry and ethnopharmacological aspects of genus Calendula. Pharmacognosy Reviews. — doi:10.4103/0973-7847.120520
2. Goodwin TW (1954). Studies in carotenogenesis. 13. The carotenoids of the flower petals of Calendula officinalis. Biochemical Journal. — doi:10.1042/bj0580090
3. Kasprzyk Z, Wojciechowski Z (1967). The structure of triterpenic glycosides from the flowers of Calendula officinalis L. Phytochemistry. — doi:10.1016/0031-9422(67)85009-x
4. Della Loggia R, Tubaro A, Sosa S, Becker H, et al. (1994). The Role of Triterpenoids in the Topical Anti-Inflammatory Activity of Calendula officinalis Flowers. Planta Medica. — doi:10.1055/s-2006-959562
5. Zitterl-Eglseer K, Sosa S, Jurenitsch J, Schubert-Zsilavecz M, et al. (1997). Anti-oedematous activities of the main triterpendiol esters of marigold (Calendula officinalis L.). Journal of Ethnopharmacology. — PubMed PMID: 9254116
6. Pommier P, Gomez F, Sunyach MP, D'Hombres A, et al. (2004). Phase III Randomized Trial of Calendula officinalis Compared With Trolamine for the Prevention of Acute Dermatitis During Irradiation for Breast Cancer. Journal of Clinical Oncology. — doi:10.1200/JCO.2004.07.063
7. Sharp L, Finnilä K, Johansson H, Abrahamsson M, Hatschek T, Bergenmar M (2013). No differences between Calendula cream and aqueous cream in the prevention of acute radiation skin reactions – Results from a randomised blinded trial. European Journal of Oncology Nursing. — doi:10.1016/j.ejon.2012.11.003
8. Kodiyan J, Amber K (2015). A Review of the Use of Topical Calendula in the Prevention and Treatment of Radiotherapy-Induced Skin Reactions. Antioxidants. — doi:10.3390/antiox4020293
9. Givol O, Kornhaber R, Visentin D, Cleary M, et al. (2019). A systematic review of Calendula officinalis extract for wound healing. Wound Repair and Regeneration. — doi:10.1111/wrr.12737
10. Reider N, Komericki P, Hausen BM, Fritsch P, et al. (2001). The seamy side of natural medicines: contact sensitization to arnica (Arnica montana L.) and marigold (Calendula officinalis L.). Contact Dermatitis. — doi:10.1034/j.1600-0536.2001.450503.x

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: Calendula ethnobotany and traditional use
2. PubMed: Calendula history of pharmacology
3. PubMed: Calendula and radiation dermatitis trials

External Authoritative Resources

• European Medicines Agency — Calendulae flos: EU herbal monograph (2008, revised 2018)
• Touwaide A, Appetiti E — Herbs in History: Calendula (American Herbal Products Association, 2023)
• King's American Dispensatory (1898) — Calendula (full text)
• Culpeper's Complete Herbal — full text at Project Gutenberg

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Connections

• All Herbs
• Calendula Hub
• Calendula Benefits
• Arnica
• Chamomile
• Saffron
• Aloe Vera
• Yarrow
• Comfrey
• Lutein
• Contact Dermatitis
• Breast Cancer

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