Woolly distaff thistle
Carthamus lanatus
Family · Asteraceae · Irritating
The yellow late-summer thistle, wrapped in white cobweb and armed with hard outward-pointing spines, dominating verges and dry fields when everything else has dried. It goes through thin trousers easily.
Roadsides and waste ground · Fields and pasture · Town and roadside
Also known assaffron thistle, distaff thistle
How to tell it
A stiff plant to a metre, its stem and leaves wrapped in a web of white hairs, especially near the flower. Yellow heads ringed by stiff, cut, spiny bracts. The stem leaves are divided into segments each tipped with a spine.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
No relevant use
It is a direct relative of cultivated safflower, source of the dye and the oil, but this one is not used. It indicates overgrazed pasture: it appears where livestock have eaten everything else.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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