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burdock

   Also found in: Dictionary/thesaurus, Medical, Wikipedia, Hutchinson 0.04 sec.
burdock (bûr`däk), common name of any plant of the genus Arctium of the family Asteraceae (aster aster [Gr.,=star], common name for the Asteraceae (Compositae), the aster family, in North America, name for plants of the genus Aster, sometimes called wild asters, and for a related plant more correctly called China aster (Callistephus chinensis
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 family), coarse biennials indigenous to temperate Eurasia and mostly weedy in North America. The flowers, usually purple, are followed by roundish many-seeded burs. The great burdock (A. lappa) has been used medicinally and (in Japan) cultivated as a vegetable called gobo. The young leaves are eaten as a salad in Scandinavia and Japan. The common burdock is A. minus. The cocklebur is sometimes confused with burdock. Burdock is classified in the division Magnoliophyta Magnoliophyta (măg'nōlēŏf`ətə)
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, class Magnoliopsida, order Asterales, family Asteraceae.

burdock

Any plant of the genus Arctium, in the composite family, bearing globular flower heads with prickly bracts. Native to Europe and Asia, burdock species have been naturalized throughout North America. Regarded as weeds in the U.S., they are cultivated for their edible root in Asia. Their fruits are round burrs that stick to clothing and fur.


burdock
a coarse weedy Eurasian plant of the genus Arctium, having large heart-shaped leaves, tiny purple flowers surrounded by hooked bristles, and burlike fruits: family Asteraceae (composites)


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The burdock never grows alone, but where there grows one there always grow several: it is a great delight, and all this delightfulness is snails' food.
Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison.
Here in soap boxes hidden among the trees were stored all their treasures: wee baskets and plates and cups made of burdock balls, bits of broken china for parties, dolls, soon to be outgrown, but serving well as characters in all sorts of romances enacted there,--deaths, funerals, weddings, christenings.
 
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