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Updated: July 28, 2025
Appearance of a green level land Cardoon and giant thistles Villages of the Vizcacha, a large burrowing rodent Groves and plantations seen like islands on the wide level plains Trees planted by the early colonists Decline of the colonists from an agricultural to a pastoral people Houses as part of the landscape Flesh diet of the gauchos Summer change in the aspect of the plain The water-like mirage The giant thistle and a "thistle year" Fear of fires An incident at a fire The pampero, or south-west wind, and the fall of the thistles Thistle-down and thistle-seed as food for animals A great pampero storm Big hailstones Damage caused by hail Zango, an old horse, killed Zango and his master.
There were always herds of deer on the lands where the cardoon thistle flourished most, and it was a delight to come upon them and to see their yellow figures standing among the grey-green cardoon bushes, gazing motionless at us, then turning and rushing away with a whistling cry, and sending out gusts of their powerful musky smell, which the wind sometimes brought to our nostrils.
Rio Sauce. Sierra Ventana. Third Posta. Driving Horses. Bolas. Partridges and Foxes. Features of the Country. Long-legged Plover. Teru-tero. Hail-storm. Natural Enclosures in the Sierra Tapalguen. Flesh of Puma. Meat Diet. Guardia del Monte. Effects of Cattle on the Vegetation. Cardoon. Buenos Ayres. Corral where Cattle are slaughtered.
The land for miles round it was covered with a dense growth of cardoon thistles. Now the cardoon is the European artichoke run wild and its character somewhat altered in a different soil and climate. The large deep-cut leaves are of a palish grey-green colour, the stalks covered with a whitish-grey down, and the leaves and stems thickly set with long yellow spines.
Before their introduction, however, the surface must have supported, as in other parts, a rank herbage. I doubt whether any case is on record of an invasion on so grand a scale of one plant over the aborigines. As I have already said, I nowhere saw the cardoon south of the Salado; but it is probable that in proportion as that country becomes inhabited, the cardoon will extend its limits.
Rice was first cultivated in Italy at the end of the fifteenth, and maize at the beginning of the seventeenth, century. Potatoes and tomatoes were brought from America; artichokes seem to be nothing but a cultivated variety of the cardoon which was known to the Romans, yet the peculiar character superinduced by cultivation appears of more recent origin.
A little distance from the house were the kitchen, bakery, dairy, huge barns for storing the produce, and wood-piles big as houses, the wood being nothing but stalks of the cardoon thistle or wild artichoke, which burns like paper, so that immense quantities had to be collected to supply fuel for a large establishment.
Just where these furthest sheep were grazing there was a scattered troop of seventy or eighty horses grazing too, and when I rode to that spot I all at once found myself among a lot of rheas, feeding too among the sheep and horses. Their grey plumage being so much like the cardoon bushes in colour had prevented me from seeing them before I was right among them.
The plant, a little over a foot in height, was growing in the shelter of some large cardoon thistle, or wild artichoke, bushes. It had three stalks clothed with long, narrow, sharply-pointed leaves, which were downy, soft to the feel like the leaves of our great mullein, and pale green in colour.
The cardoon is as high as a horse's back, but the Pampas thistle is often higher than the crown of the rider's head. To leave the road for a yard is out of the question; and the road itself is partly, and in some cases entirely closed. Pasture, of course there is none; if cattle or horses once enter the bed, they are for the time completely lost.
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