Thistles, Thorns and Briers

Thistles Thorns & Briers began to form after a moment of illogical hiatus, walking across a meadow in West Cornwall near Porthennals on my way to the shop where I noticed and for want of something more to digress the chore in hand, I photographed the Thistle as a Mandala would be viewed, directly above the top with radiant foliage and the looping cyclic pattern in each leaf, a layer of miniscule thornlets arranged as the hairs on a pigskin resisting the remaining dew droplets. The flower of this plant is a pink to blue colour and looking up I saw many in various stages of development.
The idea of a trap laid close to the ground for the unwary pedestrian crossed my mind as the common story of the Scots Thistle is retold, eulogized into an identifiable icon as an emblem of national pride because a nocturnal marauding viking trod into the spiny heart of a thistle as he stole upon the slumbering would-be-victims who sat bolt upright at the nordic scream of agony, it is too too Beano/Dandy for my sceptical reasoning but I am prepared to leave the matter unchallenged until I learn more about the Thistle.

They are beneficial to the Liver and the Kidney, both the antithesis of the stereotypical whiskey infused inter-clan relationship.

I have more Jute to suture, hard work as this is a plant based fibre, eaten as a glutonous vegetable in parts of Africa although grown more commonly in South Asia and in particular India where it formed the basis of a textile industry for clothing as well as more domestic and industrial purposes. This connection with a robust plant based textile infused some curiosity about the Thistles original purpose in earlier society, it is very fibreous and we seem to have lost so many of our original reasons for doing things. We tend to get all contemporary activities that have a long history within human society presented as "early forms of trading", "early forms of technology", just by comparing the modern reason with the early technique and for me , that cannot stack up.
I have seen Flint Tool workings in Sussex described as "Flint Tool Factory", or Greenstone deposits in West Cornwall described as "Greenstone Axe-Head Factories" implying that money changed hands as it might in eastern green B&Q, you simply cannot compare the early activities of a developing society with the monetarized systems of modern if somewhat flawed, society.