Description:

• Annual or perennial herbs with spiny-winged stems
• Leaves rosulate to alternate, serrate, sinuate-dentate or pinnatifid, teeth spinose or occasionally rigidly ciliate
• Capitula discoid, many-flowered, sometimes terminal, on long peduncles, sometimes subsessile or glomerate
• Involucre ovoid, globose or cylindric; bracts in many rows, patent or recurved, spiny
• Receptacle flat or convex, densely setose
• Florets bisexual, fertile; corolla purple or white, tube narrowly cylindric below, dilated above, deeply lobed or sometimes ± 2-lipped
• Anthers with bases sagittate, adjacent auricles connate and produced into entire or lacerated tail; filaments glabrous or pilose
• Style abruptly thickened above with ring of hairs below thickening; branches short, obtuse, minutely papillose, rarely filiform
• Cypselas obovoid-oblong, smooth, glabrous, with apical rim
• Pappus of scabrid to barbellate, decidous bristles, basally connate in ring
• x = 8, 9, 11 (6, 7, 10, 13) (aneuploids, high polyploidy, B-chromosomes)

Nomenclature:

• *Carduus L.
  • Linnaeus: 820 (1753)
  • Oliver & Hiern: 433 (1877)
  • Phillips: 849 (1951)
  • Kazmi: 300 (1963-1964)
  • Henderson & Anderson: 330 (1966)
  • Hilliard: 576 (1977)
  • Bremer: 143 (1994)

Distribution & Notes:

• Global: Species 91, Eurasia, Mediterranean region, East Africa
• Southern Africa: Species 2: *Carduus tenuiflorus Curtis, known from Gauteng, Western and Eastern Cape, and *C. macrocephalus Desf., occurring in the Eastern Cape, are introduced weeds