Field eryngo
Eryngium campestre
Family · Apiaceae · Irritating
The whitish thistle that fills dry pastures and, when dry, breaks free and rolls with the wind across the fields of Castile. It is not a true thistle: it is an umbellifer in disguise.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Montado · Uplands
Also known aswatling street thistle
How to tell it
The whole plant is stiff, whitish and spiny, with leathery, deeply cut leaves and pale veins. The flowers gather into greenish oval heads ringed by star-like bracts. It grows alone on dry, trodden ground.
What it is confused with
Sea holly
Eryngium maritimum
Place settles it: sea holly only grows in beach sand and is bluish; field eryngo lives in dry inland fields and is whitish. And sea holly is protected, this one is not.
Open sheet →What it is for
The root had folk-medicine use as a diuretic, and in Castile the dry thistle marks where the seta de cardo grows, a prized mushroom that fruits on its dead roots. That is the only reason this plant comes up in mushroom talk.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.