Gymnos from A to Z

Gymnocalycium eurypleurum Ritter

Friedrich Ritter went from Asuncion to Filadelfia by bus on September 18, 1963 and later travelled to the Cerro Leon, an area not sought out by cacti hunters before. He arrived near the Cerro Leon in early afternoon and because of dense vegetation decided to visit the mountain in the next morning. Ritter used the remaining time to explore the flat terrain near the mountain range. That's when he found G. eurypleurum. None of the collected plants actually reached Europe, since Ritter was forced to quarantine all his findings in Chile, his residence at that time, and not one of the specimen survived. In the end, only the seeds reached Ritter's sister Ms H. Winter in Germany. It was there that Gymnocalycium collector Ferdinand Plesnik from Olomouc ordered 200 grain of seed under the field number FR 1178. Mr Plesnik shared some of the sparsely germinating seedlings with other friends of cacti. This and the fact that the first seedlings began to bloom after four years and yielded seeds, contributed to sustaining the species in our collections. It does not surprise that F. Plesnik published the first description in the Kaktusy magazine in 1972. Since Plesnik neglected to place a sample with an officially recognised herbarium, the new species remained nomen invalid (Metzing et all. 1995). Ritter published his own diagnosis of Gymnocalycium eurypleurum in 1979. Ritter's description is accompanied by a sample placed in the herbarium ā€žUā€œ (Uetrecht), making it legal (Metzing et all. 1995).