Chrysanthemum for Cooling, Fever and Sore Throat

Across China, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, chrysanthemum tea is what you drink when the weather is oppressive, when a sore throat is starting, or when someone decides you are "too hot". It is described as a cooling drink, and that word is where most English-language explanations of this herb immediately go wrong.

"Cooling" is a category in a traditional system of medicine. It is not a temperature, and it is not a claim about your body's thermoregulation. Chrysanthemum tea is normally drunk hot. It does not lower core body temperature, it has never been shown to reduce a measured fever, and no published study has found it to be an antipyretic in humans. Understanding what the tradition means by "slightly cold" is the whole job of this page — because once you understand it, the tea makes sense on its own terms, and you stop needing a fake physiological justification for it.

The species behind everything below is Chrysanthemum morifolium (菊花 ju hua) unless stated otherwise. The sore-throat and boil indication shifts to a different plant, Chrysanthemum indicum (野菊花 ye ju hua), at a specific point, and that shift is one of the more practically useful things here. Neither is Tanacetum cinerariifolium, the pyrethrum insecticide plant that also gets called a chrysanthemum.

Table of Contents

1. What "Cooling" Actually Means
2. Wind-Heat: the Pattern Chrysanthemum Is For
3. Sang Ju Yin and the Classical Formulas
4. Two Species, Two Jobs: ju hua vs ye ju hua
5. Fever: What the Evidence Says
6. Sore Throat: Mechanism, Comfort and Limits
7. The Preclinical Antimicrobial and Anti-Inflammatory Work
8. Summer Cooling Drinks and What They Really Do
9. The Other Side of "Cold": Who It Does Not Suit
10. When a Fever or Sore Throat Needs a Doctor
11. Practical Use During a Cold
12. The Verdict
13. Key Research Papers
14. Connections

What "Cooling" Actually Means

Chinese materia medica classifies every substance on a thermal scale — hot, warm, neutral, cool, cold — alongside flavour (sweet, bitter, sour, pungent, salty) and the channels it is said to enter. Chrysanthemum is recorded as sweet, bitter and slightly cold, entering the lung and liver channels.

This scale is not thermometry. It is a shorthand for what a substance is used for and in whom. Read it as a clinical index rather than a physical measurement:

• A "cold" or "cool" herb is one prescribed for presentations described as hot: redness, fever, thirst, irritability, burning sensations, yellow discharge, a rapid pulse, a red tongue with yellow coat. Its practical meaning is "use this in that picture, not the opposite one."
• A "warm" or "hot" herb is prescribed for cold presentations: chills, pallor, aversion to cold, watery discharge, loose stool, a slow pulse, a pale tongue.
• The classification also encodes side-effect expectations. Cold herbs are traditionally expected to burden digestion if overused, which is why the tradition warns against long-term cold herbs in people with weak digestion — and, as it happens, why heavy chrysanthemum drinkers who get loose stools are experiencing something the system predicted centuries before anyone measured it.

Crucially, the thermal category has nothing to do with the temperature of the drink. Chrysanthemum is drunk hot, and it is still "slightly cold". Ginger tea is also drunk hot and is "warm". Iced water is physically cold and is not a cold herb. Conflating these is the commonest error in popularised accounts.

Two things follow. First, "cooling" is a perfectly coherent statement inside its own system and does not need rescuing by pseudo-physiology. When someone says chrysanthemum is cooling, they are saying something informative — it belongs to the group used for hot, red, irritable, feverish presentations. Second, translations like "chrysanthemum reduces internal heat and inflammation, thereby lowering body temperature" are not the tradition speaking. They are a modern gloss that borrows credibility from two systems at once while being supported by neither. This site's position is that the tradition's own vocabulary is more honest and more interesting than the fake translation.

Wind-Heat: the Pattern Chrysanthemum Is For

Chrysanthemum's first listed traditional action is "disperses wind-heat" (疏散风热). To make sense of it you need the classical distinction between two kinds of early respiratory illness, because it determines which herbs get used and it is genuinely a diagnostic distinction rather than a decorative one.

• Wind-cold — chills predominate over fever, aversion to cold, no sweating, body aches, a stiff neck and shoulders, clear or white watery nasal discharge, a mild or absent sore throat. Treated with warm pungent herbs: fresh ginger, cinnamon twig, perilla leaf, scallion white.
• Wind-heat — fever predominates over chills, sore throat often severe and red, thirst, yellow or thick nasal discharge, headache, red eyes, a cough that is dry or productive of yellow sputum. Treated with cool pungent herbs: mulberry leaf, mint, forsythia, honeysuckle flower — and chrysanthemum.

So the traditional indication is narrower than "chrysanthemum for colds". It is chrysanthemum for the early stage of a hot-type upper respiratory illness with sore throat, red eyes and headache, and traditional practice would specifically not use it for the shivery, clear-runny-nose, no-sore-throat presentation. A practitioner handed those symptoms would reach for ginger, and would consider chrysanthemum actively unsuitable.

Whether that distinction maps onto anything microbiological is a separate and largely unstudied question. What it does map onto is something people recognise: some colds start with a raw, burning throat and feel hot, and others start with chills and a streaming nose. The tradition sorted illnesses by how they present and matched herbs to presentation. That is a reasonable thing for a pre-microbiological medicine to have done, and it produced a stable, teachable system. It did not produce evidence of antiviral activity.

Sang Ju Yin and the Classical Formulas

Chrysanthemum's most famous appearance in this territory is Sang Ju Yin (桑菊饮), "Mulberry Leaf and Chrysanthemum Decoction", from Wu Jutong's Wen Bing Tiao Bian (温病条辨) of 1798 — the foundational text of the "warm disease" school, which reorganised Chinese medicine's approach to febrile illness. The formula is short and its logic is transparent:

• Mulberry leaf (sang ye) and chrysanthemum flower (ju hua) as the paired chief herbs, both cool and light, directed at the lung and the surface.
• Apricot kernel (xing ren) and platycodon root (jie geng) to address the cough and open the chest.
• Forsythia fruit (lian qiao) and mint (bo he) to clear heat and release the exterior.
• Reed rhizome (lu gen) for thirst, and licorice (gan cao) to harmonise.

Wu described this as a light formula for the very earliest stage of a warm-disease presentation — cough with mild fever and slight thirst. If the illness had progressed, a stronger formula (Yin Qiao San) was indicated instead. Even in the tradition, chrysanthemum is an early-stage, mild-case herb used in combination, at the point where a modern reader would be reaching for fluids and rest rather than treatment.

Two important observations about all this:

Chrysanthemum is never the main event. In Sang Ju Yin it is one of eight ingredients, and its dose in classical practice is modest. Selling a single-herb chrysanthemum product as a cold remedy on the strength of Sang Ju Yin is like selling nutmeg on the strength of a cake recipe.

The formula has not been tested as a drug. There is published Chinese-language work on Sang Ju Yin and related warm-disease formulas, and some pharmacological work on their constituents, but there is no body of adequately designed randomized trial evidence establishing that Sang Ju Yin shortens or attenuates a respiratory infection, and certainly none isolating the chrysanthemum in it. If you want to look, the literature is searchable on PubMed, and what you will mostly find is chemistry and network-pharmacology modelling.

Two Species, Two Jobs: ju hua vs ye ju hua

This is the practical heart of the page, and it is routinely blurred in English sources.

Chrysanthemum morifolium — 菊花 ju hua. The sweet, pale, mild tea flower. A domesticated cultigen with named grades (Hangbaiju, Gongju, Boju, Chuju). This is the daily beverage, the wind-heat herb in Sang Ju Yin, and the eye herb. Its heat-clearing action is described as gentle.

Chrysanthemum indicum — 野菊花 ye ju hua, "wild chrysanthemum". A distinct species and a separate pharmacopoeial drug with a separate entry and separate indications. Smaller, deeper yellow, aggressively bitter. Its traditional job is stronger: clearing heat and resolving toxicity (清热解毒) for boils, carbuncles, abscesses, infected skin lesions, and severe hot sore throat — and traditionally also for red swollen eyes with the same "toxic heat" quality. It is used at lower amounts, for shorter courses, and it is not a pleasure drink.

Three consequences worth carrying away:

1. If a claim involves antimicrobial or anti-infective action, check which species produced it. Much of the published antibacterial and antiviral in-vitro work on "chrysanthemum" was done on C. indicum or on its essential oil, which is more strongly active in culture. Reporting that as a property of your cup of Hangbaiju is a species error.
2. If your tea is startlingly bitter, you may have bought the wrong flower. Small, deep-yellow, intensely bitter flowers are ye ju hua. That is not a defect — it is a different herb — but it is not the mild daily tea, and traditional practice would not have you drinking it by the litre.
3. Neither species is an antibiotic. A bacterial skin infection, an abscess or a suspected streptococcal throat is a matter for medical assessment. Ye ju hua was the tool available before antibiotics existed; that is a historical fact, not a current recommendation.

And once more, because readers do search into this: Tanacetum cinerariifolium and T. coccineum — pyrethrum, formerly classified in Chrysanthemum — are the plants that natural insecticide is made from. They contain pyrethrins, are the chemical parents of permethrin and its relatives, and are not brewed. Buy dried flower heads sold as food from a food or herb supplier and the question never arises.

Fever: What the Evidence Says

Evidence tier: traditional use only. No human antipyretic evidence.

Stated plainly: there is no published human evidence that chrysanthemum tea reduces body temperature or shortens a fever. No randomized trial. No controlled temperature measurements. Nothing on which anyone could base a dose.

There is preclinical work relevant to inflammation and, for some Asteraceae species, to prostaglandin pathways — and prostaglandin E2 in the hypothalamus is the final common mediator of fever, which makes an antipyretic mechanism theoretically discussable. But "theoretically discussable" is the ceiling here. Nobody has demonstrated a temperature effect from the tea in an animal, let alone a person. If you want to check, the searches are chrysanthemum and antipyretic activity and chrysanthemum clinical trials.

What genuinely helps during a feverish illness, and is worth doing:

• Fluid. Fever increases insensible losses through sweating and faster breathing, and dehydration makes everything about being ill worse. Warm chrysanthemum tea is a perfectly good way to drink fluid, and if it is what you will actually finish, that is a real advantage over water you leave on the table.
• Rest.
• Antipyretics if you want them. Paracetamol or ibuprofen have well-characterised effects on temperature and on how unwell you feel. Note that treating a fever is mostly about comfort — moderate fever is part of the immune response, not the disease.
• Not overwrapping, which is a real and common way to make a feverish child worse.

The honest framing of chrysanthemum's role: it is a pleasant caffeine-free warm fluid that people have traditionally drunk when feverish, and the fluid is doing the work. That is worth something. It is not an antipyretic.

Sore Throat: Mechanism, Comfort and Limits

Sore throat is the indication where a warm herbal drink comes closest to doing something you can point at — and it is worth being precise about what that something is.

What warm fluids and demulcent drinks genuinely do for a sore throat:

1. Warmth is locally soothing. This is well established as symptom relief and is why hot drinks are near-universal in sore-throat self-care across cultures.
2. Swallowing a viscous or sweetened liquid coats the pharyngeal mucosa and reduces the rawness transiently. This is the entire mechanism of a demulcent, and it is why marshmallow root and honey-based preparations are used for exactly this. Chrysanthemum on its own is not particularly demulcent — but chrysanthemum with rock sugar or honey is.
3. Honey has actual evidence in cough. Reviews of randomized trials in children have found honey to perform reasonably for symptomatic relief of acute cough compared with no treatment or some alternatives, and the World Health Organization has long listed it as a home demulcent. If you are adding honey to your chrysanthemum for a sore throat, the honey is the part with the trial data.
4. Hydration keeps the mucosa from drying out, which matters if you have been mouth-breathing through a blocked nose.

What chrysanthemum specifically has not been shown to do: shorten a sore throat, eradicate an infection, reduce tonsillar exudate, or lower the likelihood of complications. There is no controlled trial of chrysanthemum tea in pharyngitis.

Traditionally, the stronger sore-throat chrysanthemum is ye ju hua (C. indicum), used for the hot, swollen, "toxic" throat picture — and often paired with honeysuckle flower (jin yin hua) and forsythia (lian qiao), which is the classical heat-clearing throat trio. That combination is the traditional answer to what a modern clinician would triage as possible bacterial pharyngitis. It is not an adequate answer, which is why the red flags below matter.

The Preclinical Antimicrobial and Anti-Inflammatory Work

Evidence tier: preliminary (in vitro and animal).

This is a substantial literature and it should be described accurately.

Antimicrobial. Chrysanthemum extracts and essential oils inhibit a range of bacteria and fungi in culture. The activity is generally reported as more pronounced for Chrysanthemum indicum, which fits its traditional use for boils and infected sores. Some in-vitro antiviral activity has been reported for chrysanthemum constituents against various viruses in cell culture.

Three reasons this does not translate to your teacup. First, in-vitro antimicrobial concentrations are typically milligrams per millilitre of a concentrated solvent extract, applied directly to organisms — a state of affairs that a swallowed dilute infusion does not create anywhere in your body except perhaps transiently in the mouth. Second, essential oil is a tiny fraction of the flower and is only partly water-soluble, so an infusion contains far less of it than a distilled or solvent-extracted preparation. Third, "inhibits bacterial growth on a plate" is a screening result: most plant extracts do this to some degree, and the vast majority never become anti-infective agents.

Anti-inflammatory. Better characterised mechanistically. Chrysanthemum extracts and their isolated flavones — luteolin, apigenin, acacetin — suppress NF-κB activation, reduce inducible nitric-oxide synthase and nitric-oxide output, and reduce TNF-α and interleukin release in cultured macrophages, with corresponding reductions in inflammation in rodent models. Luteolin and apigenin have large independent literatures of this kind; see Luteolin and Apigenin.

Why that is not "chrysanthemum reduces inflammation in you". The dose gap again: a cup made from five to ten flower heads supplies a few milligrams of mixed flavones to a whole person, flavone absorption is modest, and what is absorbed is extensively conjugated in the gut wall and liver into metabolites with different activity. The step from cell culture to a clinical anti-inflammatory effect is exactly the step that has not been taken.

Polysaccharides are the third strand — a large and growing preclinical literature on immunomodulatory and gut-microbiota effects of chrysanthemum polysaccharides, reviewed in the International Journal of Biological Macromolecules in 2024 by Zhang and colleagues. Two caveats: it is all preclinical, and polysaccharides are poorly extracted by a three-minute hot-water steep, so a review of chrysanthemum polysaccharides is not a review of chrysanthemum tea.

Summer Cooling Drinks and What They Really Do

The most common real-world use of chrysanthemum tea in hot climates has nothing to do with illness. It is a summer drink, and it deserves describing accurately because it is a genuine good.

• Iced kek huai in Malaysian and Singaporean hawker centres, often with monk fruit (luo han guo) — the standard hot-weather order.
• Chrysanthemum with honeysuckle flower in Chinese summer cooling drinks, and in the liang cha (凉茶, "cooling tea") tradition of Guangdong.
• Chrysanthemum with rock sugar and goji, or in "eight treasures tea" (ba bao cha).
• Chrysanthemum tea jelly set with agar, a common Cantonese dessert.
• Vietnamese trà hoa cúc, frequently blended with licorice root or honey.

What these drinks genuinely provide in hot weather: fluid, which is the thing that actually matters; a pleasant flavour that encourages you to drink more of it than you would drink plain water; no caffeine, hence no diuretic argument to have; and, if iced, physical cooling from the ice. That is a real benefit list and it needs no pharmacology at all.

The one thing to watch: the commercial canned and bottled versions are frequently sweetened to soft-drink levels. If you are drinking two or three a day in hot weather for hydration, you may be taking on 40–90 g of sugar without registering it. Brew your own, or read the label. This is by far the most consequential health fact about chrysanthemum tea as it is actually consumed worldwide, and it has nothing to do with the flower.

The Other Side of "Cold": Who It Does Not Suit

An underappreciated feature of the traditional classification is that it comes with its own contraindication built in. If chrysanthemum is "slightly cold", the tradition expects it to be unsuitable for cold presentations and to burden digestion when overused. That prediction lines up with something readers report often enough to be worth stating:

• Loose stools or diarrhoea with heavy chrysanthemum intake. Commonly reported, entirely consistent with the traditional caution against cold herbs in people with weak digestion, and a straightforward signal to drink less.
• Stomach discomfort or a chilled feeling after strong or repeated cups.
• Poor appetite with sustained heavy use, in traditional terms attributed to cold injuring the spleen and stomach.
• Wind-cold colds — the chilly, clear-runny-nose, no-sore-throat presentation. Traditional practice regards cool herbs as actively unhelpful here and would use warm ones instead. Ginger tea is the sensible traditional swap.
• People described as having a "cold constitution" — habitually cold hands and feet, low tolerance of cold weather, loose stools. Traditional practice moderates cold herbs in this group.

None of that is a toxicology finding. It is a two-thousand-year observational tradition arriving at practical advice: if strong chrysanthemum tea upsets your digestion or makes you feel chilled, drink less of it. That is good advice regardless of the framework it came from.

The real contraindication, however, is not thermal — it is allergic. Chrysanthemum is an Asteraceae plant and cross-reacts with ragweed, mugwort, chamomile, feverfew, marigold and arnica sensitivity. That is covered in full on the allergy, preparation and safety page, and it is the section to read before you try chrysanthemum for the first time.

When a Fever or Sore Throat Needs a Doctor

Chrysanthemum tea is a comfort measure. The following are not comfort-measure situations, and reaching for tea instead of assessment is where herbal self-care does actual harm.

Get urgent medical assessment for:

• Difficulty breathing, drooling, inability to swallow saliva, a muffled or "hot potato" voice, or stridor with a sore throat — possible epiglottitis or deep-neck-space infection. This is an emergency.
• Severe one-sided throat pain with trismus (difficulty opening the mouth), deviation of the soft palate, or a swollen neck — possible peritonsillar abscess.
• Fever with a stiff neck, severe headache, photophobia, confusion, or a non-blanching rash — possible meningitis or sepsis.
• Fever with breathlessness, chest pain or confusion.
• Any fever in an infant under three months, and a low threshold in children generally.
• Fever in someone immunosuppressed — chemotherapy, transplant medication, high-dose steroids, known neutropenia. A fever in this group is a medical emergency until proven otherwise.
• Fever over five days, or a fever that settles and then returns.
• Sore throat with high fever, tonsillar exudate and tender neck glands but no cough — the pattern most suggestive of streptococcal pharyngitis, which is a diagnosis worth making because untreated it carries a small risk of complications including rheumatic fever.
• A sore throat lasting more than a week or two, particularly with hoarseness, unexplained weight loss, a neck lump, or in a smoker.
• Dehydration — not passing urine, dizziness on standing, marked lethargy.

See also Fever, Sore Throat and Common Cold for the fuller symptom picture.

Practical Use During a Cold

Setting expectations correctly, here is a sensible way to use chrysanthemum while unwell.

• Five to ten dried flower heads per cup (roughly 1–3 g), water just off the boil, three to five minutes. Two or three cups a day sits inside traditional practice; pharmacopoeial decoction practice for Chrysanthemi Flos runs around 5–10 g of dried flowers daily.
• Add honey rather than sugar if the throat is sore — the honey is the part with symptomatic evidence behind it. Not for infants under one year, because of the botulism risk.
• Pair it traditionally if you like: with mulberry leaf for a wind-heat cold, with honeysuckle for a hot sore throat, with licorice for sweetness and throat coating — noting that licorice at sustained high intake affects potassium and blood pressure and is not a free ingredient.
• Do not switch to ye ju hua thinking stronger is better. It is a different herb, more bitter, traditionally used at lower amounts for shorter courses.
• Do not use it instead of an antipyretic if you want your temperature down, and do not use it instead of assessment if any red flag above applies.
• Do not drink it if you have a known Asteraceae allergy without reading the allergy page first. Being unwell is a bad time to discover a cross-reaction.
• If it makes your digestion worse — loose stools, stomach ache — stop. That is the tradition's own predicted downside, and it is common.

The Verdict

• "Cooling" — a traditional energetic category, correctly used. It tells you what presentations chrysanthemum is for. It is not a temperature and not a measured physiological effect, and it should not be translated into one.
• Wind-heat colds, early stage — traditional use only. A real, specific, well-documented classical indication, always in combination, always at the mild end. No trial evidence.
• Fever reduction — not supported. No human antipyretic evidence for chrysanthemum in any form.
• Sore throat — genuine symptomatic comfort from warmth, sweetness and fluid; nothing specific to the flower. Honey is the ingredient with the evidence.
• Antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory activity — preliminary, largely in vitro, stronger for C. indicum than for the tea species, and at concentrations a cup cannot produce.
• Hot-weather hydration — a real, unglamorous, genuine benefit, undermined only by the sugar in the canned versions.

Drink it when you are ill because warm fluid helps and this is a nice one. Do not expect it to bring a temperature down, and do not let it delay assessment of a throat or fever that has any warning sign attached.

Key Research Papers

All citations are PubMed topic searches rather than numeric identifiers, so no link can quietly point at the wrong paper. Named papers have their title, journal and year stated in the text.

1. Liu Y and colleagues, “Chrysanthemum morifolium as a traditional herb: a review of historical development, classification, phytochemistry, pharmacology and application”, Journal of Ethnopharmacology (2024) — the comprehensive species review, including the classical indications. Find it on PubMed.
2. Yuan H and colleagues, “The flower head of Chrysanthemum morifolium Ramat. (Juhua): a paradigm of flowers serving as Chinese dietary herbal medicine”, Journal of Ethnopharmacology (2020) — the flower as food-medicine, which is how the cooling drinks are actually used. Find it on PubMed.
3. Zhang ZJ and colleagues, “Review of polysaccharides from Chrysanthemum morifolium Ramat.: extraction, purification, structural characteristics, health benefits, structure–activity relationships and applications”, International Journal of Biological Macromolecules (2024) — the immunomodulation literature, all preclinical, and on a fraction a short steep barely extracts. Find it on PubMed.
4. Chrysanthemum indicum reviews — the separate species behind most of the antimicrobial claims, with a distinct traditional indication. PubMed topic search.
5. Chrysanthemum antimicrobial activity in vitro — extracts and essential oils against bacteria and fungi. Read the concentrations and the preparation method. PubMed topic search.
6. Chrysanthemum anti-inflammatory mechanism — NF-κB, nitric oxide and cytokine suppression in cultured macrophages and rodent models. PubMed topic search.
7. Chrysanthemum and antipyretic activity — run this yourself; the emptiness of the result set is the finding. PubMed topic search.
8. Sang Ju Yin and warm-disease formulas — what has and has not been published on the classical formula chrysanthemum belongs to. PubMed topic search.
9. Honey for acute cough and sore throat — reviews of randomized trials, mostly in children. The ingredient people add to chrysanthemum that actually has trial data. PubMed topic search.
10. Hot drinks and upper respiratory symptom relief — the small experimental literature on why a warm drink helps a sore throat and blocked nose. PubMed topic search.
11. Sore throat management and streptococcal pharyngitis diagnosis — the clinical framework for deciding when a throat needs treating rather than soothing. PubMed topic search.
12. Fever management in adults and children — what antipyretics do and do not achieve, and why moderate fever is not itself the enemy. PubMed topic search.

Connections

• All Herbs
• Chrysanthemum — Benefits Deep Dive — the hub, with the evidence summary for all four claims.
• Chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum morifolium) — cultivars, compounds, dosage and full cautions.
• Chrysanthemum — Allergy Risk, Preparation and Safety — the real contraindication, and how to buy and brew.
• Chrysanthemum Tea for Eye Health and Screen Strain — the other traditional-use-only claim.
• Fever — what a fever is, and when it needs assessing.
• Sore Throat — causes, red flags and what helps.
• Common Cold — the illness chrysanthemum is most often reached for.
• Headache — the other symptom in the traditional wind-heat picture.
• Echinacea — Cold and Flu Prevention — another Asteraceae herb for colds, and one with actual trials to argue about.
• Elderberry — Cold and Flu — the same claim examined where some trial data exists.
• Marshmallow Root — Cough and Sore Throat — the demulcent mechanism done properly.
• Manuka Honey — Digestive and Sore Throat — the ingredient worth adding to the cup.
• Chen Pi — another Chinese food-medicine whose traditional category is worth reading in its own vocabulary.
• Luteolin — the flavone behind the anti-inflammatory mechanism claims.

Safety and disclaimer. This article is educational and is not medical advice. Chrysanthemum has no demonstrated antipyretic or anti-infective effect in humans; its use for fever, colds and sore throat is traditional-use-only. Do not use it in place of medical assessment. Seek urgent care for difficulty breathing or swallowing, drooling, stridor, a muffled voice, severe one-sided throat pain, fever with stiff neck, confusion or a non-blanching rash, fever in an infant under three months, fever in anyone immunosuppressed, or a fever lasting more than five days. Chrysanthemum is an Asteraceae plant: anyone allergic to ragweed, mugwort, chamomile, feverfew, marigold or arnica should read the allergy and safety page before drinking it. Never brew flowers of unknown species, and never brew pyrethrum. Do not give honey to infants under one year. Consult a clinician or pharmacist before adding concentrated chrysanthemum extracts to any prescribed regimen, and during pregnancy or breastfeeding.

Back to Table of Contents