Maihueniopsis molfinoi

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Maihueniopsis molfinoi, photographed by Morten Ross — fig. g Morten Ross, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 187521525

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 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Maihueniopsis molfinoi, 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 Northwest	AGW	SOUTHERN AMERICA
Bolivia	BOL

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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 106 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-7.7 °C	-3.5 °C	-0.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	15.0 °C	18.5 °C	21.2 °C
Annual rainfall	275 mm	584 mm	1,021 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	1 mm	4 mm	18 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 106 research-grade observations of Maihueniopsis molfinoi 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 6 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.

Maihueniopsis glomerata subsp. hypogaea (Werderm.) G.J.Charles
Maihueniopsis hypogaea (Werderm.) F.Ritter
Maihueniopsis leptoclada F.Ritter
Opuntia hypogaea Werderm.
Opuntia molfinoi (Speg.) Werderm.
Tephrocactus hypogaeus (Werderm.) Backeb.

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.