Dried is the default and not the original
Almost everything in an international herbal catalogue is dried, because drying is what makes a plant a tradable good. But several of the traditions this catalogue describes use fresh material and always have — guava leaf in the tropics, curry leaf in South India, rose geranium in Morocco, red shiso in a Japanese summer. Buying the dried version and finding it disappointing is not discovering a bad supplier; it is meeting a different product.
What drying costs and what it gives
Drying removes volatile aroma and concentrates sugar, acid and tannin. Sometimes that is a loss — curry leaf dried is nearly inert. Sometimes it is a gain: bay leaf is better dried than fresh, and oregano concentrates rather than fades. Occasionally it creates the character outright, as with valerian, whose distinctive smell develops during drying rather than existing in the fresh root.
Preserves are a third thing
Korean yuja-cha and mogwa-cha are fruit layered with sugar or honey for weeks and spooned into hot water. Salt-pickled cherry blossom is preserved in salt and plum vinegar and reopens in the cup. Salted kumquat sits in a jar for years and goes almost black. None of these is steeped and none is dried, and treating them as an infusion produces something wrong.
Frozen beats dried for the tropical aromatics
Makrut lime leaf and curry leaf keep far more of their character frozen than dried, and both are sold frozen in shops that serve the communities that use them. Where a tradition uses a leaf as a fresh ingredient, frozen is the honest compromise and dried is a different drink.
Ageing, which is none of the above
Chenpi is the one material here that is deliberately made worse in the short term to become better in the long. Fresh mandarin peel is sharp and one-dimensional; twenty-year Xinhui peel is dark, woody and complex, and is stored, aired and dated like wine. It is the only botanical in this catalogue where age is the product.