Centaurea calocephalaWilld.

WFO wfo-0000023047 Accepted WFO 2026-06 3 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–c · 1 observation

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 1 time, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Centaurea calocephala, photographed by Conrad Altmann
fig. a Conrad Altmann, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-06-29 / obs. 43426638
Centaurea calocephala, photographed by Conrad Altmann
fig. b Conrad Altmann, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 43426905
Centaurea calocephala, photographed by Conrad Altmann
fig. c Conrad Altmann, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 43426868

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 4 botanical countries

Regions where Centaurea calocephala is native: Albania, Bulgaria, NW. Balkan Pen., Romania AlbaniaBulgariaNW. Balkan Pen.Romania
Native distribution of Centaurea calocephala, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Albania ALB EUROPE
Bulgaria BUL
NW. Balkan Pen. YUG
Romania ROM

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 61 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -7.2 °C -5.1 °C -3.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 21.7 °C 24.8 °C 28.0 °C
Annual rainfall 637 mm 673 mm 864 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 86 mm 124 mm 145 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 61 research-grade observations of Centaurea calocephala that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 6 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Centaurea atropurpurea Waldst. & Kit.
  • Centaurea calophylla Steud.
  • Centaurea glauca Desf. ex DC.
  • Centaurea subalpina Schur
  • Colymbada atropurpurea (Waldst. & Kit.) Holub
  • Cyanus atropurpureus Baumg.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.