Plantae > Tracheophyta > Magnoliopsida > Asterales > Asteraceae > Onopordum > Onopordum acanthium

Onopordum acanthium (Cotton Thistle)

Synonyms:

Wikipedia Abstract

Onopordum acanthium (Cotton thistle, Scotch thistle) is a flowering plant in the family Asteraceae. It is native to Europe and Western Asia from the Iberian Peninsula east to Kazakhstan, and north to central Scandinavia, and widely naturalised elsewhere. It is a vigorous biennial plant with coarse, spiny leaves and conspicuous spiny-winged stems.
View Wikipedia Record: Onopordum acanthium

Infraspecies

Onopordum acanthium acanthium
Onopordum acanthium ceretanum
Onopordum acanthium gypsicola
Onopordum acanthium var. araneosotomentosum

Invasive Species

View ISSG Record: Onopordum acanthium

Attributes

Edible [1]  May be edible. See the Plants For A Future link below for details.
Flower Type [1]  Hermaphrodite
Lifespan [1]  Biennial
Pollinators [1]  Bees, Bats
Structure [3]  Herb
Usage [1]  The stem hairs are sometimes collected and used to stuff pillows; An oil obtained from the seed is used as a fuel for lamps;
Height [1]  4.92 feet (1.5 m)
Width [1]  39 inches (1 m)
Light Preference [2]  Mostly Sunny
Soil Acidity [2]  Moderate Acid
Soil Fertility [2]  Rich
Soil Moisture [2]  Mostly Dry
View Plants For A Future Record : Onopordum acanthium

Protected Areas

Predators

Consumers

Parasitized by 
Golovinomyces depressus[5]

External References

USDA Plant Profile

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Plants For A Future licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
♦ 2ECOFACT 2a Technical Annex - Ellenberg’s indicator values for British Plants, M O Hill, J O Mountford, D B Roy & R G H Bunce (1999)
♦ 3Kattge, J. et al. (2011b) TRY - a global database of plant traits Global Change Biology 17:2905-2935
♦ 4Biological Records Centre Database of Insects and their Food Plants
♦ 5Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
♦ 6del Hoyo, J., Elliott, A., Sargatal, J., Christie, D.A. & de Juana, E. (eds.). Handbook of the Birds of the World Alive. Lynx Edicions, Barcelona.
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0