knapweeds

This was thanks to the hot dry spring, which has triggered an early flush of high-summer flowers: foxgloves, thistles and knapweeds, clovers and vetches.

Plantwatch: high summer comes early 2011

The thistles, knapweeds and willowherbs are truer purple, but the bluish nettle-leaved bellflowers and field scabious are also tinged with that mysterious shadow which has more to do with night than golden day.

Country diary: Wenlock Edge 2011

As the pulse of late summer purples through thistles, knapweeds, wild basil and marjoram, flowers are crowded with butterflies, bumblebees and hoverflies.

Country diary: Wenlock Edge 2010

Their timing seemed based on the height of the great drifts of yellow, sweetly scented lady's bedstraw and the bold purple of the black and greater knapweeds.

Country diary 2010

"I said go home, sir," said the doctor sternly; and Bob turned short upon his heel, and I saw him go along the road cutting viciously at the ferns and knapweeds at every step.

Devon Boys A Tale of the North Shore George Manville Fenn 1870

The wasps were working at the pine boughs high overhead; the bees by dozens were crowding to the bramble flowers; swarming on them, they seemed so delighted; humble-bees went wandering among the ferns in the copse and in the ditches -- they sometimes alight on fern -- and calling at every purple heath-blossom, at the purple knapweeds, purple thistles, and broad handfuls of yellow-weed flowers.

The Open Air Richard Jefferies 1867

I used to stand by the mower and follow the scythe sweeping down thousands of the broad-flowered daisies, the knotted knapweeds, the blue scabious, the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that nothing escaped; and, yet although I had seen so many hundreds of each, although

The Open Air Richard Jefferies 1867

Some knotty knapweeds stay in out-of-the-way places, where the scythe has not been; some bunches of mayweed, too, are visible in the corners of the stubble.

Nature Near London Richard Jefferies 1867

Purple heathbells gleam from shrub-like bunches dotted along the slope; purple knapweeds lower down in the grass; blue scabious, yellow hawkweeds where the soil is thinner, and harebells on the very summit; these are but a few upon which the eye lights while gliding by.

Nature Near London Richard Jefferies 1867

And the last foxglove-bells are nearly fallen; and over all my fields and by the brooksides are coming up the burdock, and the coarse and vainly white aster, and the black knapweeds; and there is only one flower left to be loved among the grass, -- the soft, warm-scented Brunelle.

Proserpina, Volume 2 Studies Of Wayside Flowers John Ruskin 1859