Tarragon, Artemisia dracunculus, is a slender aromatic perennial of the daisy family with a distinctive sweet, anise-like flavour, indispensable to French cookery. Both its species name and its common name mean little dragon, dracunculus in Latin, and tarragon through the Arabic tarkhun from a Greek word for the same, names given for the serpent-like coil of its roots and for an old belief that the plant cured the bites of venomous creatures and mad dogs. Its genus, Artemisia, is that of the wormwoods and mugworts, named for the goddess Artemis.
French cookery distinguishes true French tarragon from the coarser, far less aromatic Russian tarragon, a related variety that produces fertile seed and so can be grown from seed, unlike French tarragon, which is sterile and must be propagated from cuttings or root division, a genuine horticultural quirk that keeps the finer culinary variety comparatively rare and always vegetatively propagated. Tarragon vinegar and the classic French sauce bearnaise, built on tarragon, egg yolk and butter, remain the herb's best-known modern legacy, a use entirely secular and resting on nothing more than its distinctive anise-sweet flavour.
Tarragon is also one of the few herbs whose flavour survives drying and freezing comparatively well, though French cooks still generally prefer it fresh or preserved in vinegar, judging the dried leaf a pale copy of the living plant's sharper, more volatile anise note.