Description:

• Perennial or rarely annual herbs
• Leaves alternate, often decurrent, serrate or pinnately lobed, lobes and teeth spinescent or rarely rigidly ciliate
• Capitula discoid, many-flowered, solitary, corymbose or variously clustered
• Involucre ovoid or globose; bracts in many rows, spiny or innocuous
• Receptacle flat or convex, densely setose
• Florets bisexual, fully fertile or female; corolla purple, tube narrowly cylindric below, slightly widened above, deeply 5-lobed
• Anthers linear, sagittate, adjacent auricles connate and prolonged into entire or lacerated tail
• Style abruptly thickened below branches, often with ring of hairs there; branches, often partly connate, sometimes linear or filiform
• Cypselas obovoid-oblong, glabrous, with nearly central, horizontal, basal attachment scar
• Pappus of feathery bristles in several rows; connate at base
• x = 17 (7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15) (aneuploids, polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• *Cirsium Mill.
  • Miller: [334] (1754)
  • Phillips: 849 (1951)
  • Henderson & Anderson: 348 (1966)
  • Hilliard: 578 (1977)
  • Bremer: 143 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species ± 250, temperate regions of Europe and America
• Southern Africa: Species 2: *Cirsium arvense (L.) Scop. known from Mpumalanga and Eastern Cape, and *C. vulgare (Savi) Ten. occurring in North-West, Gauteng, Northern, Western and Eastern Cape