About Tarragon (Artemisia dracunculus)
This is one of the truly great herbs (a dish of well-made scrambled eggs lightly
laced with tarragon is a Divine gift). It is a perennial hardy enough for outdoor growing
hereabouts (it is listed as hardy to Zone 5, but Zone 4 growers find it overwinters
reliably), but--sheerly for convenience--we think it better grown indoors anyway.
Cultivars
While there is reportedly at least one named cultivar (Epicure, supposedly especially
fragrant), in home-garden catalogues, tarragon is invariably offered as a generic. The only
thing one has to do is be absolutely, positively sure one is getting true "French" tarragon,
not the vastly inferior "Russian" tarragon, a completely different species, A.
dracunculoides (though it is often erroneously referred to as a cultivar of tarragon).
Though all tarragon oferings are generic, it still pays to buy it from a reputable herb
specialist, who will likely have the hardiest or most flavorful strains.
(There is also a completely unrelated plant,
Tagetes
lucida, commonly called "Mexican Tarragon" and actually a type of marigold, that is
sometimes recommended as a substitute for those who cannot grow tarragon--whoever that might
be--and is said to be a pretty decent, full-flavored herb, though not identical in taste to
real French tarragon; still, the experimentally minded might want to try a plant of it for
its own virtues and see what they think.)
Planting
French tarragon rarely if ever sets seed, and so must be grown from cuttings. The plant can
eventually get large--up to 2 feet across--so it wants a good-sized pot if grown indoors,
and that pot needs especially to be deep, because the one thing that will kill off tarragon
readily is "wet feet", to which it is very susceptible, so--in pot or in ground--its roots
need plenty of room.
For that same reason, the soil it is grown in needs to be pretty sandy, so as to have the
best possible drainage: clay soils are a very bad thing for growing tarragon. But the
soil does not need, or even want, to be rich--for best leaf flavor, average
fertility (or even less) is supposedly ideal. And when growing tarragon in a pot, put
plenty of gravel at the bottom of the pot before adding the soil, to facilitate drainage.
Growing
Tarragon absolutely detests dampness--at its roots or on its foliage--which will kill it
quickly. Besides putting it in sandy soil over a thick gravel layer (in a large pot) to
begin with, keep the foliage well pruned, removing any dead or dying foliage at once and in
general keeping the plant open to air movement, try to space it a little away from
immediate contact with any other plant's foliage, and do not wet the foliage when
watering tarragon. And, of course, water tarragon very sparingly.
Harvest tarragon as you need it, preferably literally--that is, when about to cook with it.
Cut about a third of a branch, then chop the leaves quite fine, to fully release the
flavoring oils. Tarragon makes an excellent flavored wine vinegar, and an excellent herb
butter, alone or in combination with some other fines herbes.
Although no one explicitly says so, it's probably a good idea to renew tarragon every few
years by starting a new cutting taken from a haelthy plant.
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