Milk Thistle

Milk thistle is an annual or biennial thistle of the daisy family, from about thirty centimetres to two metres tall, with shiny, spiny-edged leaves marbled with milk-white veins and large red-purple flower heads ringed by spine-tipped bracts. Its fruits are black, each with a long white plume that carries it on the wind. Native from the Mediterranean and much of Europe to Central Asia and India, it has spread far beyond that range and is treated as an invasive weed in North America, Australia and New Zealand. It is grown mainly as a medicinal crop: the seeds, botanically whole fruits, yield silymarin, and herbal tradition used the plant for liver complaints and to increase breast milk, though there is still no good clinical evidence that it helps. It was also eaten. Northcote, quoting older writers, describes the young stalks cooked like cardoon or eaten as salad, the bracts eaten like artichoke and the roots in spring, and notes that goldfinches feed on its seeds; by the doctrine of signatures its prickles made it a cure for a stitch in the side. Sometimes called Scotch thistle, it was once put forward as the thistle of Scotland. Cunningham records an Anglo-Saxon belief that milk thistle hung round a man’s neck would set every snake near him fighting.