The rest of species of study are more distantly related to the
above group. Centaurea brunnea and C. deusta have pink-purplish
florets, and flat appendages ending in membranous margins, often
with a brown spot at the base of each appendage. Centaurea
heldreichii and C. litochorea have procumbent or ascending (not
erect) stems covered, together with the leaves, by greyish-green
tomentose hairs. Moreover, C. heldreichii has pink-purplish and
C. litochorea bright, lemon-yellow, not creamy-white florets.
Centaurea brunnea is a biennial species only known from
Zaloggo mountains (western Greek mainland, south Epirus). A
record from Raska, central Serbia, under the name Centaurea splendens
L. var. splendens f. brunnea (Halácsy) Gajic´ (Gajic´ , 1975) is the
reason that Dimopoulos et al. (2013) consider this species a Balkan
endemic. However, the Greek and Serbian populations are separated
by a distance of over 400 km and given the very narrow distribution
of most species of C. subsect. Phalolepis in Greece, the two
populations are probably not conspecific. The number of mature
plants comprising the only two extant populations of C. brunnea
is not known but preliminary field observations suggest that they
barely exceed a few hundred individuals.