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.
Cirsium kamtschaticum
Kamchatka thistle is a biennial or short-lived perennial thistle from the North Pacific region, growing up to about 2 m tall with spiny leaves and pink or purple flower heads. It is a wild species of meadows and tundra, rarely grown in gardens, so care is mostly about giving it open, cool, moist conditions.
Cirsium kamtschaticum, the Kamchatka thistle, is an Alaskan and East Asian species of plants in the tribe Cardueae within the family Asteraceae. The species is found in eastern Russia (Kamchatka Peninsula, Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands), and on certain islands of the North Pacific: the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and Hokkaido Island in northern Japan.
Cirsium kamtschaticum is a biennial or perennial herb up to 200 cm (80 inches) tall, with a thick underground rhizome. Leaves are up to 40 cm (16 inches) long with thin, bristly spines along the edges. There are a few flower heads, each head with pink or purple disc florets but no ray florets. It grows in meadows and tundra.
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 kamtschaticum 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.
