Thistle

Thistle is the common name given to several plants from the Asteraceae family, with more than a million genus and more than 20,000 species from which very few are actually grown by people. This family’s name comes from the Greek word aster (star), they are spotted thanks to how their flowers are made from the fusion of hundreds or even thousands of small flowers, just like the sunflowers. The family provides many kinds of vegetables from different species: of leaves (chicory, lettuce, endive, curly endive), of flower (artichoke) or of stem (thistle). A common trait in many of these plants is that their tissue contains high amounts of latex.