Eryngium Planum SYN.: eryngium flat, blue thorn, blue Thistle, a blue-crested, birch meadow, blue Thistle, Bogachek, Golovnin, gorditsa, Jabra small, cleft sheet, centaury, Salamanca, bug, thorn blue, kolacky, love me, mole crickets, mikołajki, mikolajczyk, flat (blue), micalizzi, Mikolka, Nicolaes, finger, tumbleweeds, flights, paraletic, perepilichny, bark, polunochnik, the pig-face, senegalaise, senegalus, Tara, cartoon, certoparin. A perennial herbaceous plant that is famous for its decorative properties. In addition, it is beneficial for humans, and therefore is widely used in folk medicine. Blue-headed flat-leaved is a perennial plant that has a straight taproot and a flexible stem with a height of 30 cm to one meter. The upper part of the stem is branched. All parts of the plant have a color from blue to purple, and the colors are more pronounced above. The leaves of the flat-leaved bluebird are leathery and stiff, with prickly teeth at the edges. The basal leaves are up to 15 cm in size, oval or egg-shaped, and are arranged on long petioles. In the middle part of the plant, the leaves are indistinct, on short petioles. From above, the leaves are sessile, palmate, and have 3-5 lobes. The flowers have blue or blue petals, collected in two-centimeter egg-shaped heads. The sepals and bracts are lanceolate and have sharp teeth. The leaves of the wrapper have a length equal to the length of the flower heads (sometimes slightly longer). The blue-headed flat-leaved flower blooms in June-July, and for the first time it occurs in the second year of life. The fruits of the plant are ovate double-seeded. They have a length of up to 3 mm, scaly. The fruits ripen in August. Flat-leaved blue-head grows in the middle and southern part of the European part of Russia, in the south of Western Siberia and the North Caucasus, in the northern regions of Central Asia. The plant usually settles in dry meadows, clearings, in sandy soil, on forest edges, along the banks of rivers, in weedy places and steppe areas. For medicinal purposes, the grass and roots of the flat-leaved blueberry are harvested and used. The upper shoots of 20-25 cm long are cut off during the flowering of the plant, then cut them into small parts and dried outdoors in the shade or in a well-ventilated room. The layer thickness during drying should not exceed 3-5 cm. You can store dried grass in cloth bags or paper bags in a dry place for no more than two years. The roots of the blue-headed flat-leaf are dug out in early spring or autumn. Then they are cleaned from the ground, washed, cut into two parts and dried in the fresh air or in a dryer at a temperature of 50 degrees. The shelf life of dried roots is 3 years.