01 / 02Luethyi
Mammillaria luethyi G.S.Hinton
Collection Passport
- Joined the collection
- September 2025
- Acquired from
- Not recorded
- Tag as received
- Not recorded
- Acquired at
- Festa del CactusBologna, Italy
- Specimen
- Cultivated plant
- Grower / nursery
- Not recorded
Species’ native rangeNorthern Coahuila, Mexico
A personal collection record, not an official EU Plant Passport.
A forty-four-year
mystery.
Photographs by Norman Boke (flowering plant) and Ladislaus Cutak (bare-root specimen). View the file page and source details ↗
Photographed in 1952, this cactus remained unidentified until it was found again in northern Coahuila in 1996.
In April 1952, Norman Boke came across a small cactus flowering in a one-pound coffee tin at the Crosby Hotel in Ciudad Acuña, Coahuila. A mining prospector had brought the plants to the hotel. Boke photographed the flowering plant and sent the pictures to Ladislaus Cutak at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Cutak obtained two specimens, both of which died after transport and treatment at the border. The photographs were preserved, but the cactus remained unidentified for another 44 years.
In 1996, George S. Hinton and Jonas M. Lüthy found it growing in the wild in northern Coahuila. Hinton formally described it that year as Mammillaria luethyi.
I added the specimen shown here to my Plantastic Plant Master collection at Festa del Cactus in Bologna in September 2025.
Field reference · northern Coahuila
The plant
in its stones.
These field photographs show the scale and camouflage that disappear in cultivation: small bodies set low among limestone rubble in the Acuña region. The images are credited to the collectors and linked to their records in the Cactus and Succulent Field Number Database.
Photo credit: Grzegorz Matuszewski · 5 April 2012
Photo credit: Grzegorz Matuszewski · 6 March 2014
Photo credit: Petr Antálek · 30 October 2014
Source record: Cactus and Succulent Field Number Database · Mammillaria luethyi ↗. The source notes that the pictures are the property of the collectors.
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