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Cirsium helenioides
Melancholy thistle is a native perennial herb of northern Europe, Siberia and Central Asia, growing up to about 120 cm tall and usually blooming once with a single purple flower head before dying. It is a hardy wild plant of cool, damp, open ground, so it suits cool-climate gardens rather than warm ones.
Cirsium helenioides, the melancholy thistle, is an Asian and Arctic species of plants in the tribe Cardueae within the family Asteraceae. The species is native to Greenland (but considered extinct from Greenland since 1960), Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Xinjiang and Kazakhstan.
Cirsium helenioides is a perennial plant herb up to 120 cm (48 inches) tall, usually not branched, blooming only once before dying. Leaves are green on top, woolly underneath, with thin spines along the edges. There is one flower head per plant, with purple (occasionally white) disc florets but no ray florets.
Dwarf Thistle · Tall thistle · Rose thistle · Franciscan thistle · Alishan Thistle · Arizona thistle · Creeping Thistle · Barneby's thistle · Cirsium boninense · Cirsium brachycephalum · Palouse thistle · Clustered thistle
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Cirsium helenioides by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
