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The garden chrysanthemum is not found in the wild. Botanists believe it arose in China from crosses between wild species. It reached Japan more than 1,200 years ago, and by the 1800s it was grown in Europe and America.

The Book of Rites, compiled more than 2,000 years ago, marks the last month of autumn with a short line: the chrysanthemum has yellow flowers. In the 1000s, the scholar Zhou Dunyi called it the hermit among flowers. In 1104, Liu Meng wrote a whole book about it, describing 35 kinds sorted by color.

Chrysanthemum tea is made by steeping a few dried flower heads in hot water. It is pale gold, and in Cantonese teahouses it is often served with dim sum. On the Double Ninth Festival, the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, families climb hills and admire the flowers in bloom.

Chinese licorice comes back each year and grows 1 to 3 feet tall, with leaves made of many small leaflets and spikes of small, pea-like flowers. It grows wild in dry grasslands, sandy ground, and desert edges across northern China, Mongolia, and Central Asia.

Its roots reach deep into dry soil. They are dug in spring or autumn, trimmed, and dried in the sun. The sweetness comes mainly from a compound called glycyrrhizin. A close relative, Glycyrrhiza glabra, is the licorice of southern Europe and western Asia.

China's native mint is a close cousin of the peppermint grown in America. Botanists call it Mentha canadensis. Its leaves are gathered in summer and autumn, and steam passed through the leafy stems carries off the oil.

Peppermint itself is a cross between water mint and spearmint, first described in England in 1696. English settlers brought it to America, where it became a farm crop in Massachusetts in the early 1800s.

Menthol is the main compound in mint oil. It goes into candy canes, gum, and mints.

Pipeworts grow in wet ground, often in rice paddies and at the edges of ponds. Their leaves grow in a low tuft, and thin stalks rise above them, each topped with a single button of tiny flowers.

The Chinese name points to where it grows: in rice fields, after the grain harvest. The flower heads are gathered in autumn and dried.