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Artemisia absinthium
Also called Wormwood, Absinthe, Absinthe Wormwood, Common Wormwood, Absinthe Sagewort, Absinth Sagewort, Absinth Wormwood
Absinthium is a hardy perennial herb with silvery, aromatic foliage, grown as an ornamental and used for flavouring spirits such as absinthe. It thrives in poor to fertile, well-drained soil in full sun and is easy to grow, though it can self-seed freely.
Artemisia absinthium, otherwise known as common wormwood, is a species of Artemisia native to North Africa and temperate regions of Eurasia, and widely naturalized in Canada and the northern United States. It is grown as an ornamental plant and is used as an ingredient in the spirit absinthe and some other alcoholic beverages.
The plant can easily be cultivated in dry soil. It should be planted under bright exposure in fertile, midweight soil. It prefers soil rich in nitrogen, and can be propagated by ripened cuttings taken in spring or autumn in temperate climates, or by seeds in nursery beds. Growing the plant with others tends to stunt their growth; accordingly, it is not considered to be a good companion plant. A. absinthium also self-seeds generously. It is naturalised in some areas away from its native range, including much of North America and the Kashmir Valley of India.
This plant, and its cultivars "Lambrook Mist" and "Lambrook Silver" have gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit. These two short cultivars are very similar and more silver than typical British absinthium material and probably derive from southern Europe. "Lambrook Silver" is the earliest of these cultivars, having been selected in the late 1950s by Margery Fish, who developed the garden at East Lambrook Manor.
Most chemotypes of A. absinthium contain (−)-α- and/or (+)-β-thujone, though some do not. (−)-α-Thujone by itself is a GABAA receptor antagonist that can cause convulsions when administered in large amounts to animals and humans. However, there is only one case of documented toxicity of wormwood, in which a 31-year-old man drank 10 mL of steam-distilled pure volatile oil of wormwood, wrongly believing it was absinthe liqueur. Medicinal extracts of wormwood have not been shown to cause seizures or other adverse effects at usual doses. Thujones have not been shown to be the cause of excessive doses' toxicity for any kind of wormwood extracts, including absinthe.
Artemisia absinthium is claimed to have antifungal, neuroprotective, insecticidal, antimicrobial, anthelmintic, acaricidal, antimalarial, antidepressant, and hepatoprotective properties.
Southernwood · African Wormwood · White Mugwort · Sweet sagewort · Hedge Artemisia · Chinese Mugwort · Biennial wormwood · Coastal sagebrush · Capillary Artemisia · Carruth's sagewort · Douglas' sagewort · Tarragon
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Artemisia absinthium by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
