Centaurium pulchellum(Sw.) Druce

Lesser Centaurybranched centaurylesser centaury

WFO wfo-0000594018 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Centaurium pulchellum, photographed by Christian Berg
fig. a Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-13 / obs. 198318412

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.

Flowering 456 in flower of 469 examined

Proportion of examined Centaurium pulchellum in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 14 14 100% 78% to 100%
Feb 6 6 100% 61% to 100%
Mar 12 12 100% 76% to 100%
Apr 44 44 100% 92% to 100%
May 42 42 100% 92% to 100%
Jun 44 48 92% 80% to 97%
Jul 174 179 97% 94% to 99%
Aug 59 60 98% 91% to 100%
Sep 17 18 94% 74% to 99%
Oct 3 4 too few examined
Nov 15 15 100% 80% to 100%
Dec 26 27 96% 82% to 99%

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Centaurium pulchellum observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 456 of 469 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. One month has fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for it. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 2,020 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -14.2 °C -3.6 °C 9.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 20.7 °C 26.5 °C 33.3 °C
Annual rainfall 526 mm 1,027 mm 1,614 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 56 mm 178 mm 328 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 2,020 research-grade observations of Centaurium pulchellum 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. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 92 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.

  • Centaurium albiflorum (Kit.) Druce
  • Centaurium anatolicum (K.Koch) Tzvelev
  • Centaurium candelabrum H.Lindb.
  • Centaurium candelabrum f. albiflorum H.Lindb.
  • Centaurium caspicum (Fisch. ex Griseb.) Tzvelev
  • Centaurium chanetii (H.Lév.) Druce
  • Centaurium gracile (Schleich.) Druce
  • Centaurium inapertum Rafn
  • Centaurium meyeri (Bunge) Druce
  • Centaurium meyeri var. saxatilis (C.B.Clarke) S.Garg
  • Centaurium pulchellum f. albiflorum (H.Lindb.) Maire
  • Centaurium pulchellum subsp. meyeri (Bunge) Tzvelev
  • Centaurium pulchellum subsp. meyeri (Bunge) Tsvelev
  • Centaurium pulchellum subsp. morierei (Corb.) P.Fourn.
  • Centaurium pulchellum subsp. ramosissimum (Vill.) P.Fourn.
  • Centaurium pulchellum var. caspica (Fisch. ex Griseb.) R.R.Stewart
  • Centaurium pulchellum var. grandiflorum (Batt.) Maire
  • Centaurium pulchellum var. intermedium (Mérat) Gilmour
  • Centaurium pulchellum var. meyeri (Bunge) Omer
  • Centaurium pulchellum var. morierei (Corb.) Melderis
  • Centaurium pulchellum var. muelleri (Wittr.) Hochr.
  • Centaurium ramosissimum (Vill.) Druce
  • Chironia centaurium var. pulchella (Sw.) DC.
  • Chironia centaurium var. ramosissima (Vill.) DC.

and 68 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. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.

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. It has no native range either: Kew's checklist does not cover this taxon.