Plants may have one or few solid stems with zero to two branches, carrying few smaller leaves, the lowest pinnately segmented, and the higher increasingly simple, small and narrow.

In 1838 Augustin Pyramus de Candolle considered C. graeca was too deviant to remain in Catananche and moved the species to Cassini's genus, recombining it with Linnaeus' epithet to Hymenonema graecum.

Also in 1838, Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent and Louis Athanase Chaubard in their Nouvelle Flore du Péloponèse et des Cyclades described Catananche graeca, but now based on a specimen from the Peloponnesos.

Pierre Edmond Boissier and Theodor von Heldreich realised that the plants described by Linnaeus and by Bory and Chaubard, belonged to related but different species, therefore the last assigned name was no longer available, and hence invalid.

The latest common ancestor of both Hymenonema species is calculated to have occurred roughly 1.3 million years ago during the earlier Pleistocene.