Herb
Small apples in the grass — patience with a scent.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
The name means earth-apple, and anyone who has crushed a flower will recognise why: the smell is faintly of bruised apples. Two plants share the name in English practice — German chamomile, an annual, and Roman chamomile, a low perennial once planted as a fragrant lawn that released its scent when trodden on, which is a very sixteenth-century sort of luxury.
Its association with gentleness is unusually consistent across sources. Egyptian, Greek and northern European traditions all place it among the mild, calming, unfrightening plants, and it appears in the Nine Herbs Charm under the name maythen. Craft use follows: chamomile for sleep, for soothing a household after an argument, for money workings in the American hoodoo-influenced strand where the hands are washed in an infusion before gambling.
Gardeners will tell you it is the plant doctor — that a chamomile planted next to a sickly plant revives it. Nobody has demonstrated this. Gardeners keep saying it anyway, which is roughly the epistemic situation for most of the herb's reputation.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653)
Culpeper reports that the Egyptians dedicated camomile to the Sun, which is the origin of nearly every solar attribution given to it since. He is passing on a claim from an earlier writer rather than making one, and the chain has never been checked.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Used before sleep and after conflict, and in the American folk-magic strand as a wash for the hands before gambling. The two uses sit oddly together until you notice both are really about steadying your nerve.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.