Blessed Thistle has a long European history that stretches all the way into antiquity stretching up until present day. Indigo Herbs offers two high quality Blessed Thistle products in the form of Blessed Thistle Tincture and Blessed Thistle Cut Tea. Make this a part of your Indigo Herbs herbal range and feel the health benefits that this prickly plant can impart.

Many wonder why this thistle has the title of ‘Blessed’ as a prefix to its common name. In one of the legends of King Charlemagne, the king of the Franks in the 1st century, it is said that his army was dying of the plague when campaigning for control of Western Europe. Fearing that he would lose the war an angel appeared in his dreams and told him to shoot an arrow into the air and whichever plant the arrow landed he should feed to his troops. Charlemagne did as the heavenly message instructed and his arrow landed in a big patch of thistle. Having given his army the thistle to eat all were saved from the plague and continued to fight the war. This particular thistle became known as Blessed from this moment on. This theme of Blessed Thistle being able to cure plague carried on through the Middle Ages and is written as such in Jacobus Theodorus’s exhaustive work on herbs in the 16th century. Around the same time the Christian religious reformer Martin Luther used Blessed Thistle for aches and pains in the sides of his body. Maybe because of the name, Blessed Thistle was also used to ward off evil but at the same time was thought to show the seed of an evil soul if the plant grew upon someone’s grave.

The stem of the Blessed Thistle grows about two feet high, is reddish, slender, very much branched and scarcely able to keep upright under the weight of its leaves and flowers. The leaves are long, narrow, clasping the dull green stem, with prominent pale veins, the irregular teeth of the wavy margin ending in spines. The flowers are pale yellow, in green prickly heads, each scale of the involucre, or covering of the head, ending also in a long, brown bristle. The whole plant, leaves, stalks and also the flower heads, are covered with a thin coat of fine hairs.