SALT LAKE CITY -- As summer heats up, the sight of blooming thistles may give male goldfinches a testosterone kick. Thistle flowers could signal to American goldfinches that the seeds the songbirds ...

Parts of these invasive Eurasian plants are surprisingly edible. Thistles also provide crucial nectar for butterflies and nesting material for goldfinches.

Globe thistle’s pale purple to steel blue flowers, held high on stiff stems above coarse dark green foliage, are stealing the show this summer in gardens where they grow. Sea holly is a close second ...

I declare this the Year of the Thistle. This September, the country will have the opportunity to grasp it and set us off in an exciting new direction, so Scots gardeners should celebrate this by ...

Ouse Fen, Cambridgeshire It was as if someone had burst a thousand pillows along the bank There are specks in the sky over every field and garden, silver-spoked seeds of thistledown, the snowflakes of ...

In the mountains of southern Spain, one type of thistle plant seems to have built-in air conditioning. “Those are substantial coolings relative to the air next to it,” says Christopher Still, an ...

Southern Spain’s landscape in high summer is perhaps best described as “crunchy.” Under the unrelenting sun, grass turns to brown straw, and almost everything green shrivels and dies—except for the ...

Wenlock Edge This time of year, summer throws up the surprising and dangerous, as if to show that beauty and pain are never far apart Thistles are weeds of ill-repute. In these dog days they make ...