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Scolymus maculatus
Also called Spotted Golden Thistle, Spotted Thistle, Spotted Oyster Thistle
Scolymus maculatus is a spiny annual plant in the family Asteraceae. It is known as scolyme taché in French, cardogna macchiata in Italian, ⵉⵙⵔⵉ in Tamazight cardo borriquero in Spanish, and escólimo-malhado in Portuguese, חוח עקוד in Hebrew and سنارية حولية in Arabic. In English it is called spotted golden thistle or spotted oyster thistle.
The plant has pinnately incised prickly leaves and prickly wings along the stems, both with a white marginal vein. The yellow flower heads stand solitary or with a few together at the tip to the stems, and subtended by more than five leaflike bracts. It is native to the Mediterranean region in southern Europe, southwest Asia, and northern Africa, and also the Canary Islands.
The species naturally occurs on the Canary Islands, Madeira and along the Mediterranean, notably in Portugal, Spain (including on the Baleares), France (the coast of the Languedoc-Roussillon region, and the departements Vaucluse, Lot, Bas-Rhin and Somme), Italy (Sicily, Sardinia, Tuscany, Lazio, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria Apulia, Molise and Abruzzo), Malta, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Tunesia, Algeria and Morocco.
Large Flowered Golden Thistle · Common goldenthistle · Goldenthistle
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Scolymus maculatus by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
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.
