Lemon Ball cactus

Description

Parodia leninghausii is a species of South American cactus commonly found as a houseplant. Common names include Lemon Ball cactus, Golden Ball cactus and Yellow Tower cactus. Botanist Karl Moritz Schumann named it after Wilhelm Lenninghaus (1845-1918), a native of North Rhine-Westphalia who, in the 1880s, left his hometown of Ennepetal and emigrated to Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he became Guillermo Lenninghaus, and collected cacti for the German grower Haage. P. leninghausii is native to the Rio Grande do Sul province in the south of Brazil. In those regions, winter nights are cold, with a light freeze. These cacti survive in these conditions because they are quite dry at that time. P. leninghausii shows cactus species nomadism; it was successively included in genus Pilocereus K. Schumann 1895, Malacocarpus (K.Schumann) Britton & Rose 1922, Notocactus (K.Schumann) A.Berger 1929, Eriocactus (K.Schumann) Backeberg 1942, and finally ended up in Parodia (K. Schumann) F.H.Brandt 1982.