📷 Crown of Thorns — India · 13 Jun 2026
A photograph and a story, every morning
Crown of Thorns
India · nature
A cluster of small coral-red flowers on a crown-of-thorns euphorbia, the leaves still beaded with rain. A tough plant doing one delicate thing.
Euphorbia milii — crown-of-thorns — is one of those plants that's planted as much for menace as for beauty. The stems are stiff and covered in sharp grey thorns, the leaves leathery, the latex inside the stem mildly toxic. And yet the flowers, tiny coral-red bracts in tight clusters, are among the most cheerful things in any Indian garden.
This plant had been left out in a pre-monsoon shower and the leaves were still beaded with water. The flowers were dry — the bracts shed rain so quickly that you almost never see drops on them. I went in close and let the wet leaves blur in the foreground. There's a category of plants I think of as 'all defence, occasional beauty' — they spend most of their energy not being eaten, and only a little of it being attractive. Crown-of-thorns is the type specimen.