Tagetes lucida

Tagetes lucida is the herb that does it all. Known as Mexican tarragon, Mexican mint marigold, pericón, and, in the old Aztec tongue, yauhtli, this fragrant perennial from Mexico and Central America earns every name. The narrow, glossy, deep-green leaves carry a warm anise-tarragon scent and flavor, and in late summer and fall the plant scatters small, single, golden-yellow marigold flowers across a tidy foot-and-a-half mound.

In the kitchen, Mexican tarragon is the Southern gardener's answer to French tarragon, which sulks in heat and humidity. The chopped leaves bring the same sweet, anise-tinged note to corn on the cob, chayote, green beans, squash, vinegars, and teas, and thrive through the very summers that defeat true tarragon. Native to Mexico and Central America, this is a warm-climate herb that flourishes where French tarragon fails.

The plant carries a deep cultural history. The Aztecs burned Tagetes lucida as the sacred incense yauhtli, dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc, folded the leaves into the ceremonial drink chocolatl, and turned to the herb in folk medicine, a tradition alive across Mexico today. Pericón has long been taken as a gentle calmative and mild sedative, and brewed as a tea for stomach aches, colic, nausea, hiccups, diarrhea, colds, and coughs. The flowers still appear in Day of the Dead observances across the region.

In the garden, give Mexican tarragon full sun and well-drained soil, and the plant thrives on heat and modest water. Use the herb in a kitchen or pollinator bed, an ornamental-edible border, or a container, where the golden fall flowers feed bees and butterflies and the aromatic foliage turns deer aside. Perennial in the Deep South and warm zones, and easily grown as a summer annual or overwintered indoors farther north.