With miniature thistle-like flowers and leafy stems, this naturalized invasive from Europe colonizes waste areas, stream banks, and roadsides. Stems can reach 5-feet tall with broad leaves up to 2-feet long. Note the tight heads of purplish-pink tassel-like flowers surrounded by hooked bracts, and seed heads develop into brown prickly burs.

FLOWER: April–September. Spreading clusters on branch tips; flower heads dome-shaped, 3/4–1 inch wide (20–25 mm), are packed with purplish to pink disk florets; extended filament-like, white styles are sheathed with dark-purple anthers. The bracts beneath the florets mature into brown, hooked burs with numerous small, bristly seeds. The burs snag on animal fur, clothes, shoes to spread and form colonies.

LEAVES: Basal rosette for first year; alternate on stem second year. Leaves can reach 1–2-feet long (30–60 cm) by 6–12 inches wide (15–30 cm), blades oval with pointed tip, heart-shaped base; margins entire or with coarse teeth; upper surface smooth to sparsely hairy, lower surface sparsely gray-hairy.

HABITAT: Sandy, rocky soils; drainages, floodplains, forest clearings, roadsides, disturbed soils; shrublands, ponderosa forests, riparian areas.

ELEVATION: 5,000–9,400 feet.

RANGE: Widespread and naturalized  across most of United States.

SIMILAR SPECIES: Thistles, Cirsium species, have larger flowers and bristly bracts not prominently hooked, the leaves are often lined with bristles or spines, and the seeds have feathery tails, not bristly seeds enclosed in bur-like capsules.

NM COUNTIES: Northern mountains and Sacramento Mts. in mid-elevation, periodically moist habitats: Colfax, Lincoln, Los Alamos, Mora, Otero, Rio Arriba, San Juan, Santa Fe, Taos, Torrance, Union.