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| [Note Guidelines] Photographer's Note |
Hi Folk's , today I have this image of a common thistle flower and bud. in doing a bit of reading about thistle , I find myself rather surprised at how many thoughts this simple plant inspired to cross my mind. one of the first thoughts I have with this plant is it is commonly considered a weed , this makes me think of it being placed in a class of "not beneficial" a classification that I often find myself musing at... many times when looking up a plant or insect I come across the term beneficial , or not beneficial , and it always gets me thinking at how much merit this classification has , how can one say that a caterpillar is not beneficial because of its plant eating habits , then go on to say that the butterfly is beneficial because of its pollinating habits ?
here is a little tid bit from the wikipedia about thistle...
"In the language of flowers, the thistle (like the burr) is an ancient Celtic symbol of nobility of character as well as of birth, for the wounding or provocation of a thistle yields punishment. For this reason the thistle is the symbol of the Order of the Thistle, a high chivalric order of Scotland.
Another story is that a bare foot Viking attacker stepped on one at night and cried out, so alerting the defenders of a Scottish castle.... Whatever the justification, the national flower of Scotland is the thistle. It is found in many Scottish symbols and as the name of several Scottish football clubs. Carnegie Mellon University features the thistle in its crest."
so it would seem that the thistle proved not beneficial to the Viking attacker , but quite beneficial to the Scottish defender... ;-)
though the wiki did not refer to this plant as weed , or classify it as not beneficial , many sites will refer to it as a noxious weed...
when ever I come across the statement "not beneficial" I feel that it is a classification reached by linear thinking , and that if one was to examine the relationship between that classified as beneficial , and that classified as not beneficial , the classification would fall into meaninglessness leaving only components in an ecosystem...
regards
Art |
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