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Mammillarias of Oaxaca

Mammillarias of Oaxaca During our two week tour of Oaxaca state (and southern Puebla) we encountered a large number of succulent and other plants of interest, but amongst them the mammillarias were probably the most abundant in terms of the number of plants as well as the number of different species, regardless of how you count them! By my reckoning, we saw about 20 different species, some of which are rightly considered real gems of the cactus world. Identification of some of the species can be very difficult to be sure of in habitat, particularly for members of the M. supertexta group, a problem acknowledged in the New Cactus Lexicon (NCL) (see page 159, M. haageana). In this article, I will try to indicate where there is possible doubt over the identification of individual plants. I have tackled them in the order that we first saw them, which is, roughly speaking, from south Puebla head south into Oaxaca state and keep going! We had found our first mammillarias before lunch on the first day of our tour, and in fact saw plants from this family on every day in the field. The first find was near the Cañada de Cuicatlán, very pretty white plants that we thought at the time were M. haageana (Fig. 1). However, I believe these were actually M. supertexta, as the central spines on all the plants were pure white, not brown to black as in typical haageana. We found supertexta again, later in the trip, near a town called Tecomacava, which means, I believe, “eat cows”, and again (Fig. 2) close to Teotitlán (aren’t these Mexican town