Aroma and taste are different senses
The gap between how a botanical smells and how it tastes is wider than in tea, and jasmine is the clearest case: enormous scent, almost no flavour. Elecampane smells of banana and tastes overwhelmingly bitter. Honeysuckle smells of nectar and arrives on the tongue faintly bitter. Anyone choosing by smell alone will be surprised repeatedly.
Where the flavour is held determines the method
Aromatic leaves and flowers hold their character in surface oil glands, which hot water strips out in minutes and which heat destroys in drying. Roots, barks and hard seeds hold theirs inside dense woody tissue that a three-minute steep barely touches. That single fact explains almost every preparation instruction in this catalogue: steep the first, simmer the second.
Quantity is not linear
Chamomile takes a heaped spoonful and lavender takes a pinch, and the difference is not a matter of preference. Some botanicals — lavender, wormwood, ajwain, lemon myrtle, kuding — scale so steeply that a normal dose is unpleasant. If a botanical has a reputation for tasting of soap or medicine, the usual explanation is that people are using it at flower-blend quantities.
Bitterness is not a fault
Several of these are drunk because they are bitter, not despite it. Kuding is called bitter nail tea in Chinese and the sweet aftertaste that follows the bitterness is the point. Hops, wormwood and elecampane are used at pinch scale for exactly that quality. Distinguishing bitterness that belongs from bitterness that means over-extraction is most of what learning this category involves.
One name, several flavours
Marigold means two genera. Verbena means a lemon shrub or a bitter European weed. Cinnamon means two species. Buckwheat tea means two. If a botanical tastes nothing like what you expected, the first question is whether you have the plant you thought you had.
What the catalogue does not tell you
TeaHQ publishes no per-plant brewing measurements. The parameters on every botanical page are category-typical and say so in their own note, because measured figures for these plants do not exist in any source this catalogue holds. Read them as a starting point rather than as a specification.