Mammillaria carmenae

Aaah..the pink flowered plant! This could be natural or a hybrid between M. lauii and M. carmenae. There is a lot of confusion about the origins, but ther eis no doubt it makes a very pretty plant.

At the CACTUS conference organised by ARIDES in France in 2004, Dr Lau gave a presentation. Among his topics, he mentioned M. laui and M. carmenae.

The resume of this is quoted on the Arides website as:

"Dr. LAU among others told us a story about a collection of seeds carried out long ago of Mammillaria carmenae. Inadvertently he mixed with them a few seeds of Mammillaria lauii whose flowers are pink. While these two Cacti are very similar, this small misunderstanding generated an error which over the years has led many of us to collect the two variants of Mammillaria carmenae, one with a cream flower and the other with pink flowers. Dr. LAU confirmed to us that if we are in error, we need to properly name our plants, Mammillaria carmenae for those with cream flowers and Mammillaria lauii for those flowers with pink flowers."

However, I think there are now a lot of hybrids available, and so the picture is very confused.

My advice now would be to name any pink flowers plant with spines like M. carmenae as M. laui x carmenae. I am not aware of any field collections of proper M. carmenae plants with pink flowers.

It is possible that they exist, as I know that M. elongata has a natural pink flowered form, as do other species.

Ohhhh, really interesting !!! Thank u !!!

ohhh so pretty ! this tiny plant flowering are so beautiful !

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It's mine.
The color of the flowers are not the same one.

The plant is also different, yours is M. laui.

Wolter.

this is Mammillaria carmenae cv. brunispina
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this is Mammillaria carmenae x laui hybr.
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Sorry, but your last photo shows M. carmenae (very nice plant), and not M. laui. Could it be that some labels have been changed in your collection.?

Wolter.

to woltertenhoeve:
Thank you for reminding me.
i have a mistake stuck the label.
thank you very much.

Correction to my previous message: the first photo is indeed M. carmenae brunispina (very nice plant), the second and third photo (yesterday I did not have these on my screen) are M. laui or, perhaps as your photos state, a M. carmenae x laui hybrid (although it looks as if there is much more laui blood in them than carmenae blood).

Wolter.