Tansy in the Fall Garden: A Late-Summer Cutting and Drying Guide
By late August, most of the showier flowers in a cutting garden are already past their prime — the peonies are a distant spring memory, the first flush of dahlias is starting to slow, and the garden has that slightly tired, end-of-summer look. Tansy, with its clusters of small, flat, button-like yellow blooms, is just getting started. It's one of the last strong colors of the season, and one of the most forgiving to dry, which makes late summer the exact right window to be paying attention to it.
Why late August is the window
Tansy blooms in flat-topped clusters, and unlike a rose or a dahlia, it doesn't have a single dramatic peak so much as a stretch of several weeks where the color is at its most saturated before the flower heads begin to brown and go to seed. Cut too early, in July, and the yellow hasn't fully deepened; wait past the first week of September in most climates, and the blooms start shattering before they've even made it to the drying rack. The narrow window in between is when the plant's naturally high oil content — the same chemistry that made tansy a staple of medieval strewing herbs and insect-repellent sachets — is doing the most work to preserve both its color and its structure through the drying process.
Cutting and drying it right
Tansy should be cut in the cool of the morning, after the dew has burned off but before the heat of the day stresses the stems, and bundled in small groups of six to eight rather than large armfuls, which trap moisture at the center and invite mold. Hang the bundles upside down in a dark, dry space with good airflow — an attic, a closet with the door cracked, anywhere out of direct sun, which will bleach the yellow to a dull straw color within days. Given two to three weeks, well-cut tansy dries into a deep, almost mustard gold that holds for a full season, easily long enough to carry a wreath or a mantel arrangement from harvest through the winter holidays. It also pairs unusually well with cooler tones for contrast; a few stems worked in alongside our dried echinops gives a bundle real depth, gold against blue-grey, without needing a third color to complete it. Gardeners building out a full late-season harvest can also look at our dried safflower, which shares tansy's late-summer cutting window and dries at a similar rate.
Miss this window and tansy will still be there next August — it's a hardy, spreading perennial that isn't going anywhere — but a plant this generous with color deserves to be cut while it's at its best, not after it's already started to fade.