Blessed Thistle Tincture & Alcohol-Free Extract

Blessed Thistle (Cnicus benedictus, now classified by Kew as Centaurea benedicta), also called holy thistle or St. Benedict's thistle, is a spiny annual of the daisy family, Asteraceae, native to the Mediterranean region from Portugal and Morocco to Turkey and Iran, and naturalized in parts of the United States. It grows 30 to 60 centimeters with reddish, cottony, much-branched stems and oblong, deeply lobed leaves with spiny margins and conspicuous pale veins. The pale yellow flower heads, 3 to 4 centimeters across, sit singly at the branch tips nested in a ruff of leafy, spine-tipped bracts. The whole plant is intensely bitter. We extract the dried leaf, stem, and flower.