Marigold

The name marigold covers two unrelated flowers. The pot marigold (Calendula officinalis) is the Mediterranean plant of the old herbals, its golden flowers opening with the day; its genus name, from the Latin kalendae, reflects the belief that it bloomed on the first of every month. The African or Aztec marigold (Tagetes) is a New World plant of a different family. Both share the sun-bright colour that shaped their symbolism, and both turn their faces toward the light, the daily fact behind an ancient association with the sun.

Pot marigold's golden petals had a long practical life beyond the flower bed: dried and ground, they served as a cheap substitute for saffron, called poor man's saffron, used to colour and flavour broths, cheeses, butter and rice, a kitchen use recorded in English herbals from Gerard's Herball of 1597 onward. The plant is called pot marigold precisely because it was kept in the cooking pot as much as the border, a workaday history behind its later ornamental respectability. Modern herbal medicine confines itself to a genuine, modest finding, that calendula preparations have a mild antiseptic and skin-soothing action, the basis of the calendula creams sold today for minor cuts and grazes, a documented use quite distinct from any older magical claim.

Culpeper placed the calendula under the Sun and the sign of Leo, and in European folk practice it stood for constancy and for grief, strewn at funerals and worn in wreaths. The Tagetes marigold carries the heavier ritual load: in Mexico the cempasuchil, the flower whose Nahuatl name means twenty-flower, is the flower of the Day of the Dead, its petals strewn in paths to guide returning souls home, a practice with roots in pre-Columbian Aztec observance. In India marigold garlands are ubiquitous at weddings, festivals and temple offerings, draped over deities and honoured guests alike, the same golden flower serving the sun, the dead and the gods across three continents.

The Aztec use of the Tagetes flower predates the Day of the Dead festival that absorbed it: sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers, among them the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun, recorded cempasuchil already in ceremonial and medicinal use before the conquest, so the modern observance grafts an old flower onto a layered indigenous and Catholic calendar rather than inventing its role. In India the marigold most commonly strung into garlands for weddings and temple offerings is usually a Tagetes species rather than the true pot marigold, the same English name covering a Mediterranean plant and a New World one that reached Asia only after 1500. A single word, marigold, thus binds together a European herb of grief and constancy, a Mexican flower of the dead, and an Indian flower of celebration, three unrelated botanical strands united only by their shared gold.