The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Cicerbita
Also called Alpine Blue Sowthistle, Blue Sow Thistle
Cicerbita is a genus of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae, native to Asia and Europe. They are known commonly as blue sow thistles. The word Cicerbita is from the Italian, meaning "chickory-like", a comparison to Cichorium, the chicory genus.
Cicerbita alpina is eaten as a vegetable in Italy, part of its native range. The young shoots are boiled and served in olive oil or tomato sauce. They are considered a delicacy and can be had in restaurants. The shoots in oil can be purchased in markets under the local name insalata dell'orso ("bear salad"). The plant is collected from the wild and there is some concern that it may be threatened with overexploitation, so local ordinances now limit wild collection in some areas. Field trials are underway to examine the possibility of cultivating the plant in agriculture.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Cicerbita by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
