Tarragon
An anise-scented Artemisia, and the flavouring of tarkhun — the bright green soft drink of Georgia and the Caucasus that is one of the few mass-market beverages built on a kitchen herb. French and Russian tarragon are the same species and taste almost nothing alike.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Artemisia dracunculus
- Family
- Asteraceae
- Part used
- Leaf
- Origin
- Temperate Asia and North America
- Drunk in
- Georgia, Armenia, Iran, France
Character
Clean aniseed with a green herbal base, sweeter than fennel and much softer than star anise. Russian tarragon is grassier and has very little of the anise.
Notes: anise, green, vanilla
History
French tarragon is a sterile clone propagated only by division, which is why it has stayed genetically uniform since it entered European cultivation and why it cannot be grown from seed. Tarkhun the drink was formulated in Tbilisi in the 1880s by a pharmacist and became a Soviet-wide product.
How it is drunk
Infused in Georgia, Armenia and Iran, where tarkhun is both a herb in cooking and a drink. In France it is a kitchen herb and not a drink at all, which is the clearest case in this file of one plant with two entirely separate cultures around it.
Production
French tarragon is cut before flowering and dried quickly at low temperature, losing a good deal of aroma in the process — it is one of the herbs most degraded by drying. Russian tarragon grows from seed, is far coarser and is what most cheap dried tarragon is.
Preparation
Infusion · Cold infusion
Herbal infusion (tisane)
1–2 g/100 ml · 90–95 °C · 5 min
Category-typical practice rather than a measurement for this specific botanical. Most infusions are far more tolerant of a long steep than tea is.
What gets confused
French and Russian tarragon are botanically the same species and commercially different products. Seed-grown tarragon is always the Russian sort, because the French clone does not set viable seed.
Common mistakes
- Buying seed-grown plants expecting French tarragon flavour. It cannot be grown from seed.
Related botanicals
- Anise — Clean aniseed with a green base, and the pair that explains why tarkhun tastes the way it does.
- Mexican marigold — Sold as Mexican tarragon and Texas-tarragon, both of which the taxonomic authority lists as English names for the marigold. Real tarragon is Artemisia dracunculus and is not related to it.
Comparisons
- Tarragon vs anise — Two clean aniseed flavours from unrelated plants, and the pair that explains why Georgian tarkhun tastes the way it does. One is a leaf and the other a seed, and the leaf is greener.
- Mexican tarragon and French tarragon — Two unrelated plants sold under one name. The marigold is used as a tarragon substitute in hot climates where real tarragon will not grow, and the substitution is closer than the botany suggests.
Guides
Evidence for this page
The botanical name, family and distribution above are checked against an external authority. Artemisia dracunculus L. — GRIN-Global Taxonomy record— retrieved and read, not countersigned by a named human. That source covers naming and distribution only. Everything else on this page — history, culture, production, flavour, preparation and buying advice — is TeaHQ’s own synthesis with no external source behind it.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Tarragon is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.