Ariocarpus retusus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Ariocarpus retusus, photographed by Sandino Guerrero — fig. b Sandino Guerrero, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 43972313

Ariocarpus retusus, photographed by Jose Antonio Aranda Pineda — fig. f Jose Antonio Aranda Pineda, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 5516922

Ariocarpus retusus, photographed by Tereso Hernández Morales — fig. g Tereso Hernández Morales, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 27936929

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Ariocarpus retusus, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Mexico Northeast	MXE	NORTHERN AMERICA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 54 in flower of 591 examined

32%

25%

11%

Proportion of examined Ariocarpus retusus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	0	16	0%	0% to 19%
Feb	0	38	0%	0% to 9%
Mar	0	39	0%	0% to 9%
Apr	0	39	0%	0% to 9%
May	0	25	0%	0% to 13%
Jun	0	30	0%	0% to 11%
Jul	0	97	0%	0% to 4%
Aug	2	36	6%	2% to 18%
Sep	19	60	32%	21% to 44%
Oct	30	118	25%	18% to 34%
Nov	3	28	11%	4% to 27%
Dec	0	65	0%	0% to 6%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Ariocarpus retusus observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 54 of 591 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 114 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	3.8 °C	6.8 °C	10.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.3 °C	28.3 °C	31.6 °C
Annual rainfall	323 mm	417 mm	865 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	32 mm	41 mm	72 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 114 research-grade observations of Ariocarpus retusus that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 38 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Anhalonium areolosum Lem.
Anhalonium elongatum Salm-Dyck
Anhalonium furfuraceum (S.Watson) J.M.Coult.
Anhalonium prismaticum Lem.
Anhalonium pulvilligerum Lem.
Anhalonium retusum (Scheidw.) Salm-Dyck
Ariocarpus confusus Halda & Horáček
Ariocarpus elongatus (Salm-Dyck) Marj.H.Lee
Ariocarpus elongatus (Salm-Dyck) Wettstein
Ariocarpus furfuraceus (S.Watson) H.S.Thomps.
Ariocarpus furfuraceus f. cristata Frič
Ariocarpus furfuraceus var. rostratus A.Berger
Ariocarpus prismaticus (Lem.) Cobbold
Ariocarpus prismaticus var. maior Frič
Ariocarpus prismaticus var. minor Frič
Ariocarpus pulvilligeris (Monv. ex C.F.Först. & Rümpler) K.Schum.
Ariocarpus retusus f. elongatus (Salm-Dyck) Batov
Ariocarpus retusus f. furfuraceus (S.Watson) Batov
Ariocarpus retusus f. jarmilae (Halda, Horáček & Panar.) Batov
Ariocarpus retusus subsp. confusus (Halda & Horáček) Lüthy
Ariocarpus retusus subsp. horacekii Halda & Panar.
Ariocarpus retusus subsp. jarmilae Halda, Horáček & Panar.
Ariocarpus retusus subsp. panarottoi Halda & Horáček
Ariocarpus retusus subsp. pectinatus Weisbarth

and 14 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.