Carthamus lanatus (woolly distaff thistle)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Carthamus lanatus, photographed by Tim Johnson — fig. a Tim Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-02 / obs. 202879460

Carthamus lanatus, photographed by Annika Lindqvist — fig. b Annika Lindqvist, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187967833

Carthamus lanatus, photographed by Facundo Chieffo — fig. c Facundo Chieffo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 168129616

Carthamus lanatus, photographed by Cesar Ormazabal — fig. d Cesar Ormazabal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 168108791

Carthamus lanatus, photographed by Pavel Kacl — fig. g Pavel Kacl, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 159588711

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Flowering 237 in flower of 332 examined

50%

55%

22%

51%

80%

95%

88%

63%

25%

54%

63%

Proportion of examined Carthamus lanatus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	5	10	50%	24% to 76%
Feb	6	11	55%	28% to 79%
Mar	0	7	0%	0% to 35%
Apr	2	9	22%	6% to 55%
May	21	41	51%	36% to 66%
Jun	81	101	80%	71% to 87%
Jul	76	80	95%	88% to 98%
Aug	21	24	88%	69% to 96%
Sep	5	8	63%	31% to 86%
Oct	3	12	25%	9% to 53%
Nov	7	13	54%	29% to 77%
Dec	10	16	63%	39% to 82%

Peak flowering in Jul. Each bar is the share of Carthamus lanatus observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 237 of 332 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,038 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-4.2 °C	1.3 °C	9.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.2 °C	27.2 °C	33.2 °C
Annual rainfall	354 mm	672 mm	1,176 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	10 mm	98 mm	184 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 2,038 research-grade observations of Carthamus lanatus that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 33 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Anactis pilosa Raf.
Atractylis fusus-agrestis Gaertn.
Atractylis lanata (L.) Scop.
Atractylis leucocephala Moench
Atractylis lutea Bubani
Atractylis pilosa Moench
Calcitrapa lanuginosa Steud.
Carduncellus lanatus (L.) Moris
Carduus attractylis Garsault
Carthamus albus Desf.
Carthamus exsuccus Chaix
Carthamus lanatus subsp. trachycarpus (Coss. & Durieu) Sostak.
Carthamus lanatus var. abyssinicus (A.Rich.) Sch.Bip. ex Schweinf.
Carthamus lanatus var. algeriensis Batt.
Carthamus lanatus var. divaricatus (Bég. & Vacc.) Pamp.
Carthamus lanatus var. elegans Ball
Carthamus lanatus var. lanatus
Carthamus lanatus var. longifolius Pamp.
Carthamus macedonicus Herzog
Carthamus montanus (Pomel) Murb.
Carthamus tauricus M.Bieb.
Carthamus turbinatus Nyman
Centaurea lanata (L.) Lam. & DC.
Kentrophyllum elatum Gasp.

and 9 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.