Calendar January 2015: Ground Thistle

A Happy New Year!

One of My New Year's Resolutions is to write stories about the plants each month, which are on my 'Leaves Calendar of British Plants 2015'.  I have made relief-print calendars for three years, and thought I'd like to share the small stories about the plants what I found here in the south-east Wales.

January: Ground Thistle

(Cirsium acaule, stemless thistle, daisy family)

Walking on a field in the winter and looking at the ground, you will find a lot of thriving plants here in the south east Wales. Grasslands stay green even in the middle of winter.  We don't have so often frosty morning.  And maybe those plants are hardy enough against lower temperature.  I can pick up some green plants on the grassland; dandelion, clover, buttercup,   silverweed, plantain, thistle and so on.

Thistles?  Are they the summer flowers?  Thistles, of daisy family, usually die down in the winter.  And yet, this ground thistle is thriving among the grass and other plants throughout the year.  As the other name, stemless thistle, shows, this has no or very short stems.

Fields are mowed a couple of times during the summer.  The stemless leaves survive from the blades of lawn mowers.

One chilly morning, I found the ground thistle on a field.  There were no one except for me.  The ground wore tiny morning dews on it entire leaves.  The condensed water in the air landed on every tiny hairs.  This made this plant somehow a pale fragile look.  But, no, ground thistle is tough.  The leaves are prickly and furry as of other thistles are so.

In fact, it was hard to identify the plant.  Usually thistles grow in meadows or at boarders of field.  And ground thistle grow on a short grasslands.  At first I thought it might be dwarf thistle.  Its stem is also short, but the leaves don't look like dwarf thistle not prickly enough.


'.... grow in short grassland on the downs and limestone uplands of sothern England and across Europe.....  This plant is no longer as common as it once was, since so many of the downs are now wheat fields.' (The Pocket Guide To Wild Flowers of the British Isles and Northern Europe, Pamela Forey,  1997 edition, Parkgate Books)


Ground thistle is thought to be a declining species.  But I didn't know 'the downs'.  I had to search this.  Luckily nowadays we can search on the internet.  At first, found 'the Downs, Bristol' on the wikipedia, stating that 'an area of public open limestone downland in Bristol, England.'  I searched further the downland on Wikipedia, too.  A downland is an area of open chalk hills.  It is no wonder that ground thistle has declined.  Wheat prefers almost neutral but slightly acidic soil, while ground thistle prefers alkaline soil.  Perhaps, in addition to that,  pesticides were used on the farm lands.   As cultivated farm lands expanded, ground thistle had to be excluded.

The grassland, where I found the ground thistle, was not a wheat field, just a a short grassland in the winter, a meadow in the summer between meadows and farms.  Some seeds with pappus (hairy part attached to a seed) might have flown over from somewhere and landed on the grassland.  The ground there might contain chalk some of these stemless thistles have survived.  They are so prickly that dogs don't dig them out with their pows on the field.  They are small and flat, but tough!