“I have thistle in my garden too.” We often hear this from our customers. In fact, this description is incorrect, because the teasel is not a thistle.

The wild teasel is native throughout Europe and also quite well known - but not everyone succeeds in identifying the botanical origin. Experience shows us this again and again, especially with people who want to make their own tinctures: Some people confuse the wild teasel with similar looking plants.

As true fans of this great plant, we take the opportunity to arrange the wild teasel botanical a.

The wild teasel belongs – with all its species – to the Family of teasels. These look thistle-like but are not thistles.

Exciting, isn’t it? Now it’s botanically even more concrete.

The wild teasel has an exciting history: it is still firmly anchored in traditional Chinese medicine today. But Maria Treben - a name that many people will certainly be familiar with - also used it medicinally. In a very similar way to how Wolf-Dieter Storl does today, for example in his book "Curing Lyme Disease Naturally".

Aside from natural medicine, the prickly head of the teasel was used to soften textiles until it was replaced by chemicals, even in the industrial era.

That is why the term “carding” is still used in the textile industry today. What this means exactly and whether the term actually comes from the carding machine (spoiler: yes, it does) can be found in our historical summary.