Cleistocactus baumannii

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cleistocactus baumannii, photographed by Jose Luis Navarro — fig. b Jose Luis Navarro, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171898204

Cleistocactus baumannii, photographed by Hugo Hulsberg — fig. e Hugo Hulsberg, CC0 1.0 / obs. 174972913

Cleistocactus baumannii, photographed by Nicolas Olejnik — fig. g Nicolas Olejnik, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 55207650

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 6 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cleistocactus baumannii, 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
Argentina Northeast	AGE	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Argentina Northwest	AGW
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Paraguay	PAR
Uruguay	URU

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 176 in flower of 232 examined

85%

79%

70%

71%

29%

60%

79%

80%

75%

86%

Proportion of examined Cleistocactus baumannii in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	22	26	85%	66% to 94%
Feb	22	28	79%	60% to 90%
Mar	14	20	70%	48% to 85%
Apr	12	17	71%	47% to 87%
May	2	7	29%	8% to 64%
Jun	0	2	too few examined
Jul	2	2	too few examined
Aug	3	5	60%	23% to 88%
Sep	22	28	79%	60% to 90%
Oct	28	35	80%	64% to 90%
Nov	30	40	75%	60% to 86%
Dec	19	22	86%	67% to 95%

Peak flowering in Dec. Each bar is the share of Cleistocactus baumannii 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. 176 of 232 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 2 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. 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 308 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	5.6 °C	9.7 °C	16.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	28.3 °C	31.2 °C	33.5 °C
Annual rainfall	488 mm	902 mm	1,491 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	12 mm	32 mm	156 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 308 research-grade observations of Cleistocactus baumannii 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 40 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.

Aporocactus baumannii (Lem.) Lem.
Aporocactus colubrinus (Otto ex C.F.Först.) Lem.
Cactus flavispinus Colla
Cereus anguinus Gürke
Cereus baumannii Lem.
Cereus baumannii var. colubrinus K.Schum.
Cereus baumannii var. flavispinus Salm-Dyck ex K.Schum.
Cereus colubrinus Otto ex Salm-Dyck
Cereus colubrinus Otto ex C.F.Först.
Cereus colubrinus var. flavispinus Salm-Dyck
Cereus flavispinus Salm-Dyck
Cereus flavispinus (Colla) Haw. ex Steud.
Cereus grossei Weing.
Cereus subtortuosus C.F.Först.
Cereus tweediei Hook.
Cleistocactus anguinus (Gürke) Britton & Rose
Cleistocactus aureispinus Frič
Cleistocactus baumannii subsp. anguinus (Gürke) P.J.Braun & Esteves
Cleistocactus baumannii subsp. chacoanus (F.Ritter) P.J.Braun & Esteves
Cleistocactus baumannii subsp. croceiflorus (F.Ritter) P.J.Braun & Esteves
Cleistocactus baumannii var. colubrinus (Otto ex C.F.Först.) Riccob.
Cleistocactus baumannii var. flavispinus (Salm-Dyck) Riccob.
Cleistocactus baumannii var. grossei (Weing.) W.T.Marshall
Cleistocactus baumannii var. paraguariensis (F.Ritter) P.J.Braun & Esteves

and 16 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.