Magnificent; thank you! Now, knowing what it is and having access to accurate botanical descriptions of it, I want to see if I can work in the other direction and figure out how to identify plants like this myself. I have found a few sites that allow you to enter leaf and flower characteristics, although not many good ones, and even on those I was unable to find Centaurea montana. Thanks again for the ID.
We have just one Centaurea in our online selection and id software at findplants.net which contains over 5000 garden plants. After two entries (for purple flower having a solitary shape), I was able to narrow the selection to 67 and then browsed the images. Adding that the leaf is simple (not compound) reduced the selection to 50.
Susan, I'd like to try out your database, but can't find findplants.net: DNS searches show no ip address associated with that domain name, although a whois search shows that the domain is registered.
thanks for letting me know - I will look into it now; try aerulean.com. You are correct - the link is broken. Next email is to the engineer and then godaddy....
