Cardoon

Appearance

The wild cardoon is a stout herbaceous perennial plant growing 0.8 to 1.5 m tall, with deeply lobed and heavily spined green to grey-green tomentose leaves up to 50 cm long, with yellow spines up to 3.5 cm long. The flowers are violet-purple, produced in a large, globose, massively spined capitulum up to 6 cm in diameter.

It is adapted to dry climates, occurring wild from Morocco and Portugal east to Libya and Greece and north to France and Croatia; it may also be native on Cyprus, the Canary Islands and Madeira. In France, it only occurs wild in the Mediterranean south . It has become an invasive weed in the pampas of Argentina, and is also considered a weed in Australia and California.

In cultivation in the United Kingdom, this plant has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit.

Uses

Cardoons are used as a vegetarian source of enzymes for cheese production. In Portugal, traditional coagulation of the curd relies entirely on this vegetable rennet. This results in cheeses such as the Nisa , with a peculiar earthy, herbaceous and a slightly citric flavour that bears affinity with full-bodied or fortified wines.

The cardoon is also grown as an ornamental plant for its imposing architectural appearance, with very bright silvery-grey foliage and large flowers in selected cultivars.

Cardoon has attracted recent attention as a possible source of biodiesel. The oil, extracted from the seeds of the cardoon, and called artichoke oil, is similar to safflower and sunflower oil in composition and use.

Cardoon is the feedstock for the first biorefinery in the world converting the installations of a petrochemical plant in Porto Novo, Sardinia providing biomass and oils for the building blocks of bioplastics. Matrica, the joint venture of ENI and Novamont, will inaugurate the facility in the Fall of 2013.