Plant · P-310

Greater Burdock

Arctium lappa

Burdock is grown for its long taproot - gobo, a staple root vegetable across Japan, Korea and Taiwan - along with edible young leaves, stalks, flower pith and sprouted seed, five edible parts from one plant. Its root is also rated as one of the most powerful detoxifying herbs in both Chinese and Western herbal medicine, used for boils, infections, eczema, acne and skin disease generally. Where summers run long and hot, it behaves as a fast first-year crop rather than the biennial the northern literature describes: sown in autumn and harvested by spring, it never has to face a hot summer or flower into the burrs that follow if it is left a second year.