Oreocereus celsianus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Oreocereus celsianus, photographed by Hugo Hulsberg — fig. a Hugo Hulsberg, CC0 1.0 / 2021-11-06 / obs. 178369496

Oreocereus celsianus, photographed by Naturalist Tours — fig. b Naturalist Tours, CC0 1.0 / obs. 163908573

Oreocereus celsianus, photographed by Romi Galeota Lencina — fig. c Romi Galeota Lencina, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 26406353

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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Oreocereus celsianus, 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
Peru	PER

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 84 in flower of 207 examined

33%

15%

21%

14%

42%

75%

53%

69%

Proportion of examined Oreocereus celsianus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	5	15	33%	15% to 58%
Feb	4	26	15%	6% to 34%
Mar	0	0	too few examined
Apr	3	14	21%	8% to 48%
May	0	9	0%	0% to 30%
Jun	0	6	0%	0% to 39%
Jul	1	7	14%	3% to 51%
Aug	1	4	too few examined
Sep	10	24	42%	24% to 61%
Oct	12	16	75%	51% to 90%
Nov	39	73	53%	42% to 64%
Dec	9	13	69%	42% to 87%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Oreocereus celsianus 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. 84 of 207 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 196 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-5.3 °C	-1.0 °C	2.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	15.8 °C	19.6 °C	22.5 °C
Annual rainfall	451 mm	682 mm	1,193 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	4 mm	5 mm	22 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 196 research-grade observations of Oreocereus celsianus 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 33 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.

Borzicactus celsianus (Lem. ex Salm-Dyck) Kimnach
Cereus bruennowii (J.N.Haage ex Rümpler) Mottet
Cereus celsianus (Lem. ex Salm-Dyck) Orcutt
Cereus celsianus (Lem. ex Salm-Dyck) A.Berger
Cereus fossulatus Backeb.
Cleistocactus celsianus (Lem. ex Salm-Dyck) F.A.C.Weber
Cleistocactus tupizensis (Vaupel) Backeb. & F.M.Knuth
Echinopsis celsiana (Lem. ex Salm-Dyck) Anceschi & Magli
Oreocereus bruennowii (J.N.Haage ex Rümpler) Backeb.
Oreocereus celsianus var. bruennowii (J.N.Haage ex Rümpler) Borg
Oreocereus celsianus var. lanuginosior Salm-Dyck ex Riccob.
Oreocereus fossulatus var. gracilior (K.Schum.) Backeb.
Oreocereus fossulatus var. lanuginosior (Salm-Dyck ex K.Schum.) W.T.Marshall
Oreocereus fossulatus var. rubrispinus F.Ritter
Oreocereus maximus Backeb.
Oreocereus neocelsianus Backeb.
Oreocereus neocelsianus var. ruficeps Y.Itô
Oreocereus neocelsianus var. villosissimus Y.Itô
Pilocereus bruennowii J.N.Haage ex Rümpler
Pilocereus brunnovianus Moerder
Pilocereus brunnowianus Moerder
Pilocereus brunnowii F.Haage ex Nichols.
Pilocereus celsianus Lem. ex Salm-Dyck
Pilocereus celsianus f. auratus K.Schum.

and 9 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.