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The cotton or woolly burdock  (Arctium tomentosum) doesn’t flower until mid-summer, but the large leaves of the plant already grow mightily and catch the eye on road verges and unused plots of land. The leaves are characteristically buckled, the larger, the more buckled. “Kobruleht”, buckle-leaf, is one Estonian folk name for it. The official name refers to the look of the round flower-head with its white-cottony spiderweb-like covering on the bracts. It is a large and impressive plant, more than 1 ½ metre high and broad too – it doesn’t pass unnoticed in height or girth. The greater burdock (in the photo above) is even bigger but it doesn’t occur everywhere in Estonia.
Around settled areas and on road verges other large leaves, a bit more oblong, are noticeable too – they belong to various large-leaved species of docks, or Rumex (burdocks are not docks but belong to the Arctium genus). We will tell more about docks when their flowering period comes in summer.