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Centaurea behen is a perennial thistle-like herb from Western and Central Asia, grown for its thick roots, which are dried and used in traditional herbal medicine. It thrives in full sun in dry, open ground and is best kept in a sunny, well-drained spot.
Centaurea behen is a species of Centaurea that grows in the wild under full sun in northern Iraq and Armenia and in many other areas of Western and Central Asia with a roughly similar environment, stretching from Lebanon to Kazakhstan.
The plant's leaves near ground-level are relatively large, comparable to broad dock or spinach leaves. Rising above those leaves are branching stalks that carry much smaller lightweight leaves and, when in flower, small yellow flowers. Including the upper stalks, the plant is typically a little less than a meter high off the ground. The plant has multiple thick roots. The roots have a brown skin on the outside and a white color internally. The roots come to commerce in a dried form, looking shrivelled, and then are ground to a powder, and used for several traditional herbal medicine purposes.
Dusty miller · Cornflower · Fiordaliso di Capraia · Maltese star-thistle · Perennial Cornflower · Common Knapweed · Yellow star-thistle · Spotted knapweed · Centaurea tchihatcheffii
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Centaurea behen by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
