Wild endive (chicory )

Description:

Blue flowers . When flowering, chicory has a tough, grooved, and more or less hairy stem, from 30 to 100 centimetres (10 to 40 in) tall. The leaves are stalked, lanceolate and unlobed. The flower heads are 2 to 4 centimetres (0.79 to 1.6 in) wide, and usually bright blue, rarely white or pink. There are two rows of involucral bracts; the inner are longer and erect, the outer are shorter and spreading. It flowers from July until October. The achenes have no pappus (feathery hairs), but do have toothed scales on top.

Habitat:

It lives as a wild plant on roadsides in its native Europe, and in North America and Australia, where it has become naturalized.

Notes:

food use :) Those of cultivated chicory: the young leaves in salads, cooked in vegetable leaves and roots of chicory coffee roasted to make a coffee substitute more palatable, especially mixed with milk. 50 years ago, in the French countryside, the "coffee" was often chicory or a mixture of chicory coffee.