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German chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla L.) is cultivated in many countries because of its wide-spread uses in pharmaceutical, cosmetics and food industries. In order to investigate the effects of different soil properties on the agro-morphological characteristics, essential oil and chamazulene content of German chamomile, a pot experiment was carried out in a Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications under greenhouse conditions. Ten different soils were selected from the soil map of Chaharmahal–Va–Bakhtiari province with the scale of 1:50,000. Soil samples were collected from 0-30 cm depth of the soil series and soil properties including pH, EC, gravel, particle-size distribution, soluble K+, Ca2+ and Mg2+, SO42-, total N, available P, %OC and percentage of CaCO3 were determined. At the harvest time, agro-morphological characteristics, the content of essential oil, yield of essential oil and the percentage of chamazulene were determined. Univariate and multivariate, PCA and RA analyses were performed on the dataset. Univariate analyses showed that the agro-morphological properties of German chamomile were different in the different soil types. Also, the results demonstrated that Boldaji soil series had the highest values for dried flower yield and essential oil yield with 1172 and 7 Kg/ha, respectively. In contrast, the lowest yields with 243 and 0.2 Kg/ha were obtained for Shahrak soil series. Redundancy Analysis (RA) showed that among the soil properties, the content of sulfur, phosphorus, potassium and organic matter had the highest effect on the number of flowers, fresh and dried flower yield, straw yield, yield of essential oil and the percentage of chamazulene. |
