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Basket flower can be mistaken for a thistle when you first see it. The flower has a similar profile and color. But luckily it lacks the prickly characteristics.
Basket flower or Centaurea americana is pretty enough to make the cover of the popular field guide Wildflowers of Texas by Geyata Ajilvsgi.
Its rich green leaves are simple and alternate, somewhat pointed. Summer blooms can be three inches or more in diameter. A creamy center is dramatically accented by lavender to purple outer edges. The numerous disk flowers are showy and so are the bracts that form what looks like a woven basket enclosing the buds and holding the flower head, hence the common name.
American basket flower is an imposing plant even when solitary. Its leafy stem often branches near the top bearing a number of blooms and buds. The whole plant can measure three to five feet tall. However when basket flower is massed as I often see it in areas collecting some run-off water, it is spectacular and makes one catch their breath.
In the wild I mostly see it in openings at the edge of the woods.
Basket flower came into my garden as seeds in the soil when I transplanted some salvias from an abandoned site. It’s an annual and seeds are available in many nurseries and green plants sometimes in nurseries. It’s a fragrant butterfly attractor. Although the literature says it likes full sun and dry soil, my experience is that it does better with a little shade.
Each of the pink corollas is attached to a developing seed. When the seeds can be easily removed from the disc of the mature seed head by pulling gently on the fluff attached to the seed, they are ready to be harvested.
Here is an interesting little fact — if you touch the stamens they retract. According to Zoe Kirkpatrick in Wildflowers of the Western Plains, “when roving, probing insects make contact with them, they contract instantly, pushing pollen out over the insect to be carried to the next blossom.”
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**ARCHIVED POST AUTHOR: Bill Hopkins
