Though it looks very much like a thistle and indeed has prickly elements like a thistle, the thistle-like artichoke is in fact a member of the daisy family. A Mediterranean plant, the artichoke, sometimes known as globe artichoke, produces large flowers that people love to eat. The artichoke grows tall, from 3 to 5 feet, with long lavish gray green leaves and tall stalks on top of which burst the spiky flowers. If allowed to bloom the top of the choke erupts in purple-pink glory.

It seems likely the artichoke first developed in Sicily and was known to both the Greeks and the Romans. In 77 AD the Roman naturalist Pliny called the choke one of the earth's monstrosities, but evidently he and his colleagues continued to enjoy eating them. One reads that wealthy Romans enjoyed artichokes prepared in honey and vinegar, seasoned with cumin, so that the treat would be available year round.

North African Moors begin cultivating artichokes in the area of Granada, Spain, beginning about 800 AD, and another Arab group, the Saracens, became identified with chokes in Sicily. This may explain why the English word artichoke is derived from the Arab, al'qarshuf, rather than from the Latin, cynara. It is likely that artichokes moved up the Italian boot into Tuscany at some point unknown. Between 800 and 1500 it's probable that the artichoke was improved and transformed, perhaps in monastery gardens, into the plant we would recognize today.

The artichoke was introduced into England in 1548 but apparently didn't make a huge splash there nor anywhere else except Italy, France and a few other southern European locations. The Spanish settlers of California brought the artichoke there in the 1600's but it didn't appear to take hold beyond individual gardens until its reintroduction in the 1920's.

In 1922 Andrew Molera, a landowner in the Salinas Valley of Monterey County, California, just south of San Francisco, decided to lease land previously dedicated to the growing of sugar beets to farmers willing to try the new vegetable. His reasons were economic-already artichokes were fetching high prices and farmers could pay Molera triple what the sugar company did for the same land. By 1929 artichokes were the third largest cash crop in the Valley.

Today all artichokes grown commercially in the U.S. are grown in California, about 80 percent of them from Monterey County. The tiny town of Castroville sits in the center of vast acres of artichoke fields. It is home to the country's only artichoke processing plant, as well as the annual Artichoke Festival.