Cylindropuntia fulgida(Engelm.) F.M.Knuth

Chain-fruit Cholla

WFO wfo-0000632374 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Cylindropuntia fulgida, photographed by sprcrkwild
fig. a sprcrkwild, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-11 / obs. 200362487
Cylindropuntia fulgida, photographed by Dave Richardson
fig. b Dave Richardson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191274397
Cylindropuntia fulgida, photographed by Dave Richardson
fig. c Dave Richardson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 191098306
Cylindropuntia fulgida, photographed by CK2AZ
fig. d CK2AZ, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189101762
Cylindropuntia fulgida, photographed by CK2AZ
fig. e CK2AZ, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189076245
Cylindropuntia fulgida, photographed by Alina Martin
fig. f Alina Martin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186549228
Cylindropuntia fulgida, photographed by Samuel A Schmid, PhD, PWS
fig. g Samuel A Schmid, PhD, PWS, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 183334785
Cylindropuntia fulgida, photographed by Shaun Swanepoel
fig. h Shaun Swanepoel, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185174776

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 143 observations

Peak flowering in Jul, from 143 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 11 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.

  • Cylindropuntia fulgida f. cristata P.V.Heath
  • Cylindropuntia fulgida f. mamillata (A.Schott ex Engelm.) Guiggi & Verloove
  • Cylindropuntia fulgida f. monstruosa P.V.Heath
  • Cylindropuntia fulgida var. fulgida
  • Cylindropuntia fulgida var. mamillata (A.Schott ex Engelm.) Backeb.
  • Grusonia fulgida (Engelm.) G.D.Rowley
  • Opuntia fulgens Engelm.
  • Opuntia fulgida Engelm.
  • Opuntia fulgida var. mamillata (A.Schott ex Engelm.) J.M.Coult.
  • Opuntia mamillata A.Schott ex Engelm.
  • Opuntia mammillata Engelm.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

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