A Prickly Customer

  I'm always drawn to prickly plants with their dramatic, architectural features. Many are in my preferred blue/pink/purple colour range. Not all their flowers and leaves are spiky with jagged, steely bracts. Some are much more feathery and soft. But the effect is the same and all are great additions to  the summer border.

Most thistles are greatly beloved by bees and other pollinators.

Cirsium rivulare 'Atropurpureum' delights in boggy conditions or heavy clay soil. It's surprising that it does so well in our predominantly sandy soil. It grows to about 4ft tall, and has plum-coloured flowers and leaves that are  serrated but hardly prickly at all.
Unfortunately Cirsium is sterile so it needs to be propagated by division. It seems a waste of the copious amounts of fluffy seeds it produces.

The globe thistle, Echinops ritro, is a tough herbaceous perennial that also forms large clumps and has a great presence in the herbaceous border. The head of the globe thistle is spectacular in bud and looks as though it is made of steel. This is a plant we have grown in the past but it always got attacked by aphids and the leaves became contorted and ugly. But we may try it again in this garden.

The next prickly speciman is the eryngium or sea holly. It isn't a thistle at all but an umbellifer. The name eryngium is derived from the Greek, meaning a plant used to cure indigestion.
One favourite in particular is Eryngium Giganteum. It  has very sharp steely bracts and an almost luminous silvery appearance. This plant is a biennial and self seeds all around the border.

This plant is also known as Miss Willmott's Ghost, because it always appeared two years after the celebrated Edwardian gardener Ellen Willmott  had surreptitiously sprinkled seeds in gardens she visited.
I scattered some seeds around last year in the true Miss Willmot tradition and am looking forward to Eryngium giganteum putting in an appearance next year.

Common Teazle (dipsacus sylvestris) used to be used for medicinal purposes and for carding wool. It's another  biennial with very spiky stems and  conical flowers.  I grew several from seed last year to plant out at the back of the border to provide some height and drama. They are a great plant for butterflies and also for Gold Finches which enjoy the seeds over the winter. One fascinating feature of the teazle is that the lilac and white flowers bloom in a circular pattern around the flower head starting in the middle and opening up and down simultaneously.

 

Lastly is the tallest of them all, the giant cotton thistle, Onopordum acanthium. They grow to at least 10ft and often 15ft, with a spread of 5ft. But they are among the most dramatic garden plants, with huge grey leaves coated with a milky down, fringed with sharp spikes and great candelabras of flowering stems. It is biennial and another self seeder. This tall thistle need staking or will topple over in windy conditions.

Other facts that you may not know about Thistles:

The thistle is also the national emblem of Scotland.......
In Winnie-the-Pooh, it is Eeyore's favourite food...
There are two famous poems about Thistles : one by Ted Hughes called "Thistles" and the other by Hugh MacDiarmid called "A Drunk Man looks at the Thistle"