Centaurea sulphurea

Sicilian star-thistle

Family: Asteraceae · Type: annual · Not Native

Sicilian star-thistle is a naturalized annual found in central Sierra Nevada Foothills, central Great Valley, and southern San Francisco Bay Area in disturbed places at elevations below 300 meters. Flowering from May to June, this plant produces yellow flowers with distinctive spiny involucre bracts up to 3 centimeters long, featuring straw-colored or purple-black appendages with sharp tip-spines 10 to 25 millimeters long. Growing 1 to 10 decimeters tall with simple or openly branched stems that are soft-crinkly hairy and winged, it has a distinctive branching structure. Its leaves range from deeply lobed proximal leaves up to 15 centimeters long to entire or spiny-serrate distal leaves that are long-decurrent and puberulent with resin dots. The fruit is approximately 5 millimeters long with dark pappus bristles 6 to 7 millimeters in length.

Habitat: Disturbed places

Bloom period: May-Jun

Elevation: < 300 m

Bioregions: c SNF, c GV, s SnFrB

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.