Centaurea napifolia

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Centaurea napifolia, photographed by Karim Haddad — fig. b Karim Haddad, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 70677566

Centaurea napifolia, photographed by Aissa Djamel Filali — fig. d Aissa Djamel Filali, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 41134023

Centaurea napifolia, photographed by Peter de Lange — fig. f Peter de Lange, CC0 1.0 / obs. 6090693

Centaurea napifolia, photographed by hecklemore — fig. h hecklemore, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191039998

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 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Centaurea napifolia, 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. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Baleares	BAL	EUROPE
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Italy	ITA
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN

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 89 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	1.2 °C	7.8 °C	10.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.2 °C	27.9 °C	33.4 °C
Annual rainfall	511 mm	657 mm	923 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	19 mm	36 mm	82 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 89 research-grade observations of Centaurea napifolia 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 7 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.

Calcitrapa napifolia (L.) Moench
Calcitrapoides napifolia (L.) Holub
Centaurea napifolia subsp. napifolia
Centaurea romana L.
Centaurea zanonii Sebast. & Maur.
Cistrum napifolium Hill
Cyanus napifolius Gaertn.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
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.