(M.Bieb.) Fisch.
Description
Cirsium laniflorum is a thistle whose GBIF-documented range lies chiefly in the Pontic–Caucasian and adjacent regions, with records from Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Russia and Belgium among its roughly 92 occurrences; the himalayaflora image, taken at the Pele La in central Bhutan at 2900 m in June, documents a Himalayan population of a Cirsium of this affinity flowering in early summer. The plant occupies open grassy slopes, meadow margins, disturbed ground and roadside banks, growing on well-drained mineral soils in cool montane conditions where it forms part of the tall-herb and pasture vegetation.
The species is a robust biennial or perennial herb with an erect, often longitudinally ridged stem arising from a stout rootstock. The leaves are alternate, oblong-lanceolate in outline and pinnatifid, their lobes and margins armed with stiff yellowish spines, and the surfaces are more or less woolly, particularly beneath. The capitula are terminal, solitary or in small clusters, subtended by spine-tipped involucral bracts and conspicuously clothed in cobwebby, woolly indumentum, a feature evoked by the epithet laniflorum ("woolly-flowered"). The florets are all tubular and purple to pink-purple, and the cypselae bear a plumose, feathery pappus that detaches as a unit.
Cirsium belongs to tribe Cardueae of the Asteraceae, the spiny thistle group, in which the woolly involucres of species like C. laniflorum help insulate the developing florets and deter herbivores. The tubular flowers are visited by bumblebees, butterflies and other long-tongued insects, and the plumed achenes disperse on the wind. With a broad if scattered Eurasian distribution, the species is not of conservation concern; like many thistles it can behave as a ruderal coloniser of disturbed and grazed ground.
Author: (M.Bieb.) Fisch. · Sources: POWO (Kew), GBIF, Flora of China (Asteraceae), Flora of Bhutan, Werner Cirsium revision