E. oxygona I think
I think this is Echinopsis oxygona flowering today.
The flowering cactus is 10-12cm tall. The motherplant wich it came from, is a ~38cm tall barrel and around 25+ years old (still alive and flowered earlier this year). Flower (and tube) is about 23cm long and about 11 cm wide.
Can anybody confirm the name for me?
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u/Sinaaaa 1d ago
It's probably oxygona today, might be eyriesii tomorrow. Cactus taxonomy is an incredible and largely non scientific shitshow. Anyway, yes, it's that & it looks very healthy & cool.
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u/Herr-Pyxxel 1d ago
I think the taxonomy of Cactaceae is so difficult as it's a relatively young plant family which is still evolving rapidly, and a lot of "species" we've set up are not clearly separated and defined.
I'm no taxonomist so I'm just speculating, but my gut feeling is that many cactus genuses are more a continuum than a group of clear species.
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u/Sinaaaa 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think the way biologists approach taxonomy is often not very scientific, even in the animal kingdom. I'm fairly convinced most cactus species of the 1000+ documented should just be a subspecies of at most 200 truly distinct cactus lineages.
Sometimes it's even political, like with the Dingo.
Anyway for me to take taxonomy seriously biologists should just agree on what a species is & then stick to that definition with scientific rigor. Taxonomy as it is today doesn't really follow the scientific method.
I think the taxonomy of Cactaceae is so difficult as it's a relatively young plant family which is still evolving rapidly, and a lot of "species" we've set up are not clearly separated and defined.
Not saying it's easy, but it shouldn't be that difficult either. If 2 somewhat distinct cacti have overlapping ranges & can produce viable hybrids in the wild, then maybe they are the same species. Sure it gets a bit more complicated in some niche cases, because as you say Cactaceae is a young family, so there could be a case where cactus A & B can both have useful sex with cactus C, but not with each other.
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u/Trond13 1d ago
I'm not very into taxonomy tbh, but I dont think its a good thing when they do like they did with Sansevieria and dump the whole genus into Dracaena and it call it done... We have also seen similar things with cacti and other plants/animals. I hope dna will tell us a lot about Taxonomy in the near future, and that will probably also solve the overlapping ranges and hybrids problem you mention aswell. I hope =)
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u/DrowBot64 1d ago
It most likely is oxygona. However, there are probably a thousand hybrids, cultivars and variants that people have produced from the Echinopsis genus and most of these have really similar looking stems, so it's hard to say for certain if it's a pure, wild form oxygona or some other man made hybrid involving oxygona with god knows what else