brown knapweed (Dvarčionių pievos flora)

brown knapweed

Centaurea jacea

Summary ⁷

Centaurea jacea (Brown Knapweed or Brownray Knapweed) is a species of herbaceous perennial plants in the genus Centaurea native to dry meadows and open woodland throughout Europe. It grows to 10–80 cm tall, and flowers mainly from June to September.

Description ⁸

Perennials, 30–150 cm. Stems 1–few, erect or ascending, openly branched distally, villous to scabrous with septate hairs, loosely tomentose, ± glabrate. Leaves: basal and proximal cauline petiolate, blades oblanceolate or elliptic, 5–25 cm, margins entire or shallowly dentate to irregularly pinnately lobed; distal cauline sessile, not decurrent, gradually smaller, blades linear to lanceolate, entire or dentate. Heads radiant, in few-headed corymbiform arrays, leafy-bracted pedunculate. Involucres ovoid to campanulate or hemispheric, 15–l8 mm, usually about as wide as high. Principal phyllaries: bodies lanceolate to ovate, loosely tomentose or glabrous, usually concealed by expanded appendages, appendages usually light brown, erect, overlapping, ± concave, usually roundish, margins pale, broad, entire to coarsely dentate, membranous. Inner phyllaries: tips truncate, irregularly dentate or lobed. Florets 40–100+; corollas purple (rarely white), those of sterile florets ± expanded, exceeding corollas of fertile florets, those of fertile florets 15–18 mm. Cypselae tan, 2.5–3 mm, finely hairy; pappi absent. 2n = 22, 44.