Cirsium erisithales

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cirsium erisithales, photographed by Caleb Catto — fig. b Caleb Catto, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 162728331

Cirsium erisithales, photographed by saydelah — fig. c saydelah, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 146856610

Cirsium erisithales, photographed by nicoweg — fig. d nicoweg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 139727931

Cirsium erisithales, photographed by Elias — fig. e Elias, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 139767133

Cirsium erisithales, photographed by thomas_oswald — fig. f thomas_oswald, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 133528755

Cirsium erisithales, photographed by Gabriel Mayrhofer — fig. g Gabriel Mayrhofer, CC0 1.0 / obs. 131874302

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.

Native range 13 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cirsium erisithales, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Austria	AUT
Belarus	BLR
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
France	FRA
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Romania	ROM
Spain	SPA
Switzerland	SWI
Ukraine	UKR

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 204 in flower of 271 examined

38%

68%

84%

87%

92%

Proportion of examined Cirsium erisithales in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	0	too few examined
Feb	0	0	too few examined
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
May	9	24	38%	21% to 57%
Jun	41	60	68%	56% to 79%
Jul	92	110	84%	76% to 89%
Aug	46	53	87%	75% to 93%
Sep	11	12	92%	65% to 99%
Oct	4	4	too few examined
Nov	1	3	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Cirsium erisithales 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. 204 of 271 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 6 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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.

Also published as 4 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.

Carduus erisithales Jacq.
Carduus hybridus Steud.
Carduus ochroleucus Pers.
Cirsium scopolianum Sch.Bip. ex Nyman

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.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

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.