Eriosyce subgibbosa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Eriosyce subgibbosa, photographed by Cesar Ormazabal — fig. b Cesar Ormazabal, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 171591871

Eriosyce subgibbosa, photographed by Nicolás Villaseca Merino — fig. e Nicolás Villaseca Merino, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 188255159

Eriosyce subgibbosa, photographed by Jorge Herreros de Lartundo — fig. g Jorge Herreros de Lartundo, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 161195235

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 Eriosyce subgibbosa, 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
Chile Central	CLC	SOUTHERN 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 361 in flower of 597 examined

15%

20%

29%

50%

48%

81%

82%

79%

40%

38%

Proportion of examined Eriosyce subgibbosa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	6	39	15%	7% to 30%
Feb	11	56	20%	11% to 32%
Mar	0	15	0%	0% to 20%
Apr	4	14	29%	12% to 55%
May	13	26	50%	32% to 68%
Jun	13	27	48%	31% to 66%
Jul	57	70	81%	71% to 89%
Aug	65	80	81%	71% to 88%
Sep	94	115	82%	74% to 88%
Oct	74	94	79%	69% to 86%
Nov	18	45	40%	27% to 55%
Dec	6	16	38%	18% to 61%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Eriosyce subgibbosa 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. 361 of 597 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 660 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	7.4 °C	9.6 °C	10.8 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	16.9 °C	20.6 °C	23.5 °C
Annual rainfall	110 mm	533 mm	943 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	2 mm	4 mm	19 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 660 research-grade observations of Eriosyce subgibbosa 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 71 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.

Cactus berteroi Colla
Cactus floribundus (Hook.) Kuntze
Cactus gibbosus (Salm-Dyck) Kuntze
Cereus dichroacanthus Mart. ex Pfeiff.
Cereus foveolatus J.N.Haage ex Pfeiff.
Cereus hoffmannseggii C.F.Först.
Cereus montevidensis Pfeiff.
Chilenia acutissima (Otto & A.Dietr.) Backeb.
Chilenia castaneoides (Cels ex Salm-Dyck) Backeb.
Chilenia heteracantha Backeb.
Chilenia rostrata (Jacobi) Backeb.
Chilenia subcylindrica Backeb.
Chilenia subgibbosa (Haw.) Backeb.
Cumulopuntia berteroi (Colla) F.Ritter
Echinocactus acutissimus Otto & A.Dietr.
Echinocactus acutissimus var. cristatus C.F.Först.
Echinocactus berteroi (Colla) Gay
Echinocactus castaneoides Cels ex Salm-Dyck
Echinocactus crenatus Pfeiff.
Echinocactus exsculptus Otto ex Pfeiff.
Echinocactus exsculptus var. cristatus C.F.Först.
Echinocactus exsculptus var. elatior C.F.Först.
Echinocactus exsculptus var. foveolatus (J.N.Haage ex Pfeiff.) Salm-Dyck
Echinocactus exsculptus var. fulvispinus C.F.Först.

and 47 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.