Arctium lappa
Greater burdock, cocklebur, beggar's buttons, elephant's ear: its hooked flower heads, which cling to clothing and animal fur, inspired Swiss engineer George de Mestral in 1941 to invent what became universally known as Velcro. In the garden, it is also an old root vegetable, highly valued in Japan, where it is called gobo.
Characteristics:
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Imposing plant: enormous heart-shaped leaves and flowering stems that can exceed 1.50 m in the second year.
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Hooked flower heads: pink-purple flowers in summer, followed by the famous clinging burrs.
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Biennial: it forms a rosette in the first year, then flowers and sets seed in the second.
Precautions:
- Its hooked flower heads cling tenaciously to clothing and especially to animal fur: cut them off before maturity if you have a dog or cat, where they form knots that are difficult to remove.
- It self-seeds abundantly through this dispersal method: mow before seed production to control its spread.
Sowing advice:
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Exposure: full sun to partial shade.
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Soil: deep, loose, cool and rich — essential if you are growing it for the root: it extends more than 60 cm deep and only develops well in deeply worked soil. Avoid stony or compacted soils, which produce forked roots that are difficult to pull up.
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Method: sow from March to June or in September, in a nursery or directly in place, at a depth of 1–2 cm. Direct sowing is preferable, as its taproot does not tolerate transplanting well. See how to sow your seeds.
Care advice:
- Thin to 40 cm apart: the plant becomes large. Water during dry periods to prevent the root from becoming fibrous.
Harvesting advice:
- Harvest the roots in the autumn of the first year, before the plant flowers: afterward they become woody and inedible. Dig deeply, as they grow far down.
- Pick the young leaves in spring and the flowering stems before the buds open.
Beneficial companions:
Benefits for biodiversity:
- Its flower heads are highly attractive to pollinators and draw bees, bumblebees and butterflies in midsummer.
- Its seeds feed goldfinches, which come to extract them from the dry heads in autumn and winter.
- Its enormous leaves provide shelter appreciated by slugs and ground beetles close to the soil — useful as a slug trap near the vegetable garden.
Uses:
- The root, with a flavor similar to artichoke, is eaten cooked Japanese-style (gobo); the young leaves are eaten raw in salads or cooked like spinach; the peeled flowering stem can be eaten like an artichoke heart.
- A major traditional medicinal plant in European herbal medicine. See our medicinal plants to sow.
Harvesting your own seeds:
Leave a few flower heads to brown and dry completely on the plant, then open them — wearing gloves, as the hooks prick — to extract the elongated seeds. See how to store your seeds.
Commitment to Quality: at SemiSauvage - Permaculture, we grow and select our seeds with respect for living things as our guiding principle. Based near the Auvergne volcanoes, we choose open-pollinated, non-hybrid varieties, tested for their germination rate, carefully sorted and packaged, with no chemical treatment. Our belief: to give gardeners back the ability to resow, year after year, seeds that truly belong to them.
Grow a forgotten root vegetable and a true botanical curiosity with these greater burdock seeds.
