Praecereus euchlorus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Praecereus euchlorus, photographed by Patricio Cowper Coles — fig. b Patricio Cowper Coles, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 143058765

Praecereus euchlorus, photographed by Leonel Roget — fig. d Leonel Roget, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 6887022

Praecereus euchlorus, photographed by Pedro Alvaro Neves — fig. e Pedro Alvaro Neves, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189309585

Praecereus euchlorus, photographed by Ileana Herrera — fig. f Ileana Herrera, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 107381832

Praecereus euchlorus, photographed by B. Phalan — fig. g B. Phalan, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 54342358

Praecereus euchlorus, photographed by Étienne Lacroix-Carignan — fig. h Étienne Lacroix-Carignan, CC0 1.0 / obs. 44211988

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 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Praecereus euchlorus, 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
Bolivia	BOL
Brazil South	BZS
Brazil Southeast	BZL
Brazil West-Central	BZC
Paraguay	PAR
Peru	PER
Trinidad-Tobago	TRT
Venezuela	VEN

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 40 in flower of 89 examined

50%

27%

63%

55%

53%

11%

Proportion of examined Praecereus euchlorus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	3	6	50%	19% to 81%
Feb	3	11	27%	10% to 57%
Mar	0	6	0%	0% to 39%
Apr	2	3	too few examined
May	0	1	too few examined
Jun	0	2	too few examined
Jul	2	2	too few examined
Aug	4	4	too few examined
Sep	5	8	63%	31% to 86%
Oct	12	22	55%	35% to 73%
Nov	8	15	53%	30% to 75%
Dec	1	9	11%	2% to 44%

Peak flowering in Sep. Each bar is the share of Praecereus euchlorus 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. 40 of 89 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 261 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	9.4 °C	12.8 °C	20.4 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.9 °C	30.8 °C	32.3 °C
Annual rainfall	563 mm	1,433 mm	1,987 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	10 mm	140 mm	354 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 261 research-grade observations of Praecereus euchlorus 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 42 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.

Cephalocereus smithianus Britton & Rose
Cereus alticostatus (F.Ritter) P.J.Braun
Cereus amazonicus K.Schum. ex Vaupel
Cereus amazonicus K.Schum.
Cereus apoloensis (Cárdenas) P.J.Braun & Esteves
Cereus ballivianii (Cárdenas) P.J.Braun & Esteves
Cereus brittonianus Werderm.
Cereus campinensis (Backeb. & Voll) P.J.Braun
Cereus campinensis subsp. piedadensis (F.Ritter) P.J.Braun & Esteves
Cereus campinensis var. piedadensis (F.Ritter) P.J.Braun
Cereus diffusus (Britton & Rose) Werderm.
Cereus euchlorus F.A.C.Weber ex K.Schum.
Cereus euchlorus subsp. alticostatus (F.Ritter) P.J.Braun & Esteves
Cereus euchlorus subsp. leucanthus (F.Ritter) P.J.Braun & Esteves
Cereus lauterbachii K.Schum. ex Chodat & Hassl.
Cereus smithianus (Britton & Rose) Werderm.
Monvillea alticostata F.Ritter
Monvillea amazonica (K.Schum.) Britton & Rose
Monvillea apoloensis Cárdenas
Monvillea ballivianii Cárdenas
Monvillea brittoniana (Werderm.) Borg
Monvillea campinensis (Backeb. & Voll) Backeb.
Monvillea diffusa Britton & Rose
Monvillea euchlora (F.A.C.Weber ex K.Schum.) Backeb.

and 18 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.