It was our weeds inspector who told me about St. Barnaby’s Thistle (Centaurea solstitialis). We have it growing in joyous congregations up at Oasis Valley, Dubbo Regional Botanic Gardens, Elizabeth Park.
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You may agree it has a prickly ring to the botanic name.
Don’t be taken in by the fluffy yellow (sometimes purple) flowers dotted over the branch ends from October to March.
These vase-shaped 30 to 60cm sub-shrubs are covered with involucral bracts bearing clusters of 2-3cm spines. Ouch! Enough to get you on the hop.
Tough too!
Although only an annual sitting pretty in the Aster family alongside darling Chrysanthemums and Chamomile, St. Barnaby’s has a generic affinity with Star Thistle and Maltese cockspur; a prickly bunch having the capacity to re-establish in pasture paddocks from self-sown seed.
It has a grade of virility enough to snatch the envy of Arnie Schwarzenegger.
Arnie went down in history in his bodybuilding days as saying, “Pain makes me grow. Growing is what I want. Therefore, for me, pain is pleasure.”
In the case of St. Barnaby’s the pain is all ours.
After starting life with grey, felt-like pinnatifed basal leaves which could only be described as lyrate (terminal lobe larger than others), such vulnerable innocence (which can be removed in moist soil with one determined tug), St. Barnaby’s grows into a nasty piece of work.
It competes not only with useful pasture species for soil moisture and surface area, but can cause injury to grazing animals (and hapless gardeners tromping about – me).
A 1968 report (Blood and Henderson) from the USA, shows a condition called nigropallidal encephalomalacia of horses causes these animals much distress in swallowing and keeping awake.
The link was made to ingesting St. Barnaby’s.
Who knows?
It’s all Latin and Greek to me. Maybe they ate the plant in its innocent baby stage of growth?
No country wants to own up to being the origin of this plant, although the Mediterranean has been implicated.
If you are familiar with the Zorba Dance popular at weddings (possibly as it can finally wear everyone out), you will have an idea of my suggestion.
That scene in the Zorba movie where Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates are dancing across a paddock with increasing vigour, arm-in-arm, yelling incoherent phrases, is simply their attempt to avoid stepping on St. Barnaby’s. Quite frantic in the end.
Yes, St. Barnaby obviously had a lot of pluck (spine), or he simply ran away from his mission so fast his historian blamed the thistle.