Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Highly specialized, usually succulent, many-branched shrubs, often scandent, rarely arborescent; usually spiny, the spines variable in number, size, arrangement, and color, produced from specialized axillary structures (areoles).

Stems: Stems scandent or climbing, freely branching, cylindrical, up to ca. 2 m long, 2–3 cm in diameter, ribs 4–5. areoles with 1–3 gray or black radial spines 1–3 mm long, central spines solitary, yellowish or grey, with age with a black tip, 2–4 cm long.

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves absent. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers solitary. Flowers bisexual (perfect), very rarely unisexual, actinomorphic or occasionally zygomorphic, nocturnal, 15–22.5 cm long, 15–17.5 cm in diameter. Outer perianth parts green or pinkish, narrowly lanceolate, 5–10 cm long, 0.6–0.9 cm wide, inner perianth parts white to rose, obovate to oblanceolate, 6–10 cm long, 2–3.5 cm wide. Staminal filaments white to yellow, numerous, inserted in the throat of the receptacle tube; anthers dithecal, longitudinally dehiscent. Ovary inferior, very rarely superior, 3-carpellate to many-carpellate, 1-celled; ovules numerous, on parietal placentas, usually campylotropous, tuberculate, with areoles, sometimes spiny; style 1, green, ca. 15 cm long; stigma lobes ca. 8, green, papillate.

Fruit: Berries red; fleshy; splitting; 4–5 cm in diameter; tuberculate; the areoles with deciduous scales and often short spines; sometimes dehiscent. Seeds dull black; short; ellipsoid; verrucose.

Ploidy:

Habitat:

Elevation Range: