Centaurea pubescensWilld.

WFO wfo-0000116656 Accepted WFO 2026-06 6 photographs CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–f · 2 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 2 times, 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 pubescens, photographed by Olivier Argagnon
fig. a Olivier Argagnon, CC BY 4.0 / 2019-04-01 / obs. 63348644
Centaurea pubescens, photographed by Olivier Argagnon
fig. b Olivier Argagnon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63348646
Centaurea pubescens, photographed by Olivier Argagnon
fig. c Olivier Argagnon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63348640
Centaurea pubescens, photographed by Abdenour Kheloufi
fig. d Abdenour Kheloufi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 132831279
Centaurea pubescens, photographed by Abdenour Kheloufi
fig. e Abdenour Kheloufi, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 132835275
Centaurea pubescens, photographed by Olivier Argagnon
fig. f Olivier Argagnon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 63348630

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 pubescens is native: Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Spain AlgeriaMoroccoTunisiaSpain
Native distribution of Centaurea pubescens, 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
Algeria ALG AFRICA
Morocco MOR
Tunisia TUN
Spain SPA EUROPE

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 31 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -3.0 °C 0.5 °C 2.7 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 28.7 °C 32.8 °C 35.5 °C
Annual rainfall 146 mm 291 mm 741 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 16 mm 32 mm 76 mm

It is found where winters bring light 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 31 research-grade observations of Centaurea pubescens 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 34 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 pubescens (Willd.) Sweet
  • Centaurea abdelkaderi Sennen & Mauricio
  • Centaurea abdelkaridi Sennen
  • Centaurea carbonellii Sennen & Mauricio
  • Centaurea faurei Sennen & Mauricio
  • Centaurea incana Desf.
  • Centaurea incana subsp. incana
  • Centaurea incana subsp. ornata (Willd.) Maire
  • Centaurea incana subsp. pubescens (Willd.) Maire
  • Centaurea incana var. abdel-kaderi Sennen & Mauricio
  • Centaurea incana var. amourensis (Pomel) Sennen & Pau
  • Centaurea incana var. antiatlantica Emb. & Maire
  • Centaurea incana var. battandieri (Sennen) Maire
  • Centaurea incana var. carbonelli Sennen & Mauricio
  • Centaurea incana var. discolor Maire
  • Centaurea incana var. fulgida Maire
  • Centaurea incana var. hookeriana Ball
  • Centaurea incana var. ignea Emb. & Maire
  • Centaurea incana var. leucophylla Alleiz.
  • Centaurea incana var. litoralis Batt.
  • Centaurea incana var. monocephala Hochr.
  • Centaurea incana var. pauana Maire
  • Centaurea incana var. pseudacaulis Maire
  • Centaurea incana var. rupicola (Pomel) Maire

and 10 more.

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.