A slender thistle, often quite tall, the stem with wide spiny wings all the way to the top and cottony white. Leaves lobed and spiny margined, white cottony beneath. Flowerheads small, pinkish, 6 to 10 mm in compact clusters of 3 or more. Bracts oval-lanceolate with a curved spine tip, hairless.

Carduus crispus, the Welted Thistle

As with all Carduus, the pappus-hairs (the silky white hairs attached to the seed - the thistledown) are not feathery or branched, but simple. The stems have spiny wings, continuous all the way to below the flower-head. C crispus has a rounded flowerhead; C. tenuiflorus is narrow and almost cylindrical.  According the Stace (4th edition) the 5 corolla lobes are more or less equal; C crispus has one lobe more deeply delimited

A photograph of the whole plant in flower

Dry, open grassland, sea walls, upper edges of beaches, sandy waste ground and roadsides. Inland, it occurs on well-drained soils, often, but not always, as an alien.

Flowers May to August.

Annual or biennial.

Occasional and mainly coastal in Britain. It occurs infrequently and very locally inland.

Rare in Leicestershire and Rutland. It was not recorded in VC55 until 2007.

In the current checklist, (Jeeves 2011) is is listed as Alien (casual), with a single record