Spotted Golden Thistle

Appearance

''Scolymus maculatus'' is a spiny herbaceous annual, biennials or perennials of up to 1½ m high, that contains a milky latex. It has twenty chromosomes.

It has pinnately incised prickly leaves and prickly wings along the stems, both with a white marginal vein. The yellow flowerheads stand solitary or with a few together at the tip to the stems, and subtended by more than five leaflike bracts.

Naming

The plant is known as scolyme taché in French, cardogna macchiata in Italian, cardo borriquero in Spanish, and escólimo-malhado in Portuguese, חוח עקוד in Hebrew and سنارية حولية in Arabic. In English it is called spotted golden thistle or spotted oyster thistle.

Distribution

The species naturally occurs on the Canary Islands, Madeira and along the Mediterranean, notably in Portugal, Spain , France , Italy , Malta, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Tunesia, Algeria and Morocco.

Habitat

''Scolymus maculatus'' is nitrophilous plant, that prefers deep, rich, but disturbed clayey soils in sunny or lightly shaded positions, such as fallowed or abandoned fields, ditches and roadsides. It generally only occurs below 700 m altitude, and along the coast, where there are less than 15 frost days. In Israel it occurs in woodlands and shrublands, steppes, and desert, but also in the montane vegetation on Mount Hermon. Flowers are present between May and August. The hermaphrodite flowers are pollinated by insects.