The cultivar library
Every name, one wall
A cultivar name is a claim: that this plant was cut from one particular original, and that yours will grow up looking like that one. Here are 749 names we found a real source for, each with a mark of its own. The ring is the plant itself — its ribs, its spines, its shape — drawn from what growers have recorded, and its colour is the species family. The name is always written out in full underneath. 55 of them grow in this yard; the rest are here because you will meet them while you shop.
How to read the wall
Every plant draws its own mark
- nothing recorded yet
- 7 ribs, short spines
- monstrose
- crested
The ring is the plant seen from above, and nothing is added to it that a source did not state. 648 of the rings in this library are bare, which is the honest answer rather than a gap in the drawing. The name under each one is always written out in full.
How a seal is made →How well documented
- Well documented82 names
- More than one source describes this cultivar, or one source describes it in detail.
- Partially documented238 names
- Our sources record something real about this name — often only how often it comes up for sale — but not its full story.
- Name only429 names
- We have only ever seen the name. No history, no traits, nothing we can stand behind.
The tag is about our sources, not about the plant. Colour is the species family, spelled out beside every chip and under every seal; a grey, dashed plate means we could not place the plant at all.
Seven families, seven silhouettes
The drawings are the real differences: rounded ribs and a notched brow on a pachanoi, deep notches and frosted blue skin on a peruvianus, long needles on a slim bridgesii, a smooth near-spineless scopulicola, one flank from each parent on a cross. The dashed outline means we could not put the plant in any of these families — either nobody named a species for it, or the sources place it outside Trichocereus altogether.
2F – Ay · 1–36 of 749 names · page 1 of 21
2Face
name only — help us document it
3ko
name only — help us document it
Aaron
name only — help us document it
- Grown at Mysterious Yard
AB04
Other Trichocereus
- Grown at Mysterious Yard
AB05
Other Trichocereus
AD001
name only — help us document it
AD002
name only — help us document it
AD007
name only — help us document it
Addington
Other Trichocereus
Adele
name only — help us document it
Ahulx
name only — help us document it
Albi
name only — help us document it
Alchemist
name only — help us document it
Alko
name only — help us document it
Alpine
name only — help us document it
- Grown at Mysterious Yard
Althea
Peruvianus
Altman's Trichocereus pachanoi Monstrose (TPM)
name only — help us document it
Amaris
Hybrid
Amarocoya
Pachanoi
Amazonas
Other Trichocereus
Ancients
Bridgesii
Andre The Giant
name only — help us document it
Anita
name only — help us document it
Anna
name only — help us document it
Annie
name only — help us document it
Anok
name only — help us document it
Anra
name only — help us document it
Aoxomoxoa
name only — help us document it
Apricot
name only — help us document it
Apu Pichu
name only — help us document it
Aqualung
name only — help us document it
Arequipa
name only — help us document it
Arid Art Macro
Other Trichocereus
AWCO
name only — help us document it
Ayacucho Star
Other Trichocereus
Aymara
name only — help us document it
Sources
How this hub was written
Nothing here is copied. Every page was written from a fact list I built by reading, watching and cross-checking the sources below, with each fact tagged to where it came from. I keep that fact-by-fact record on my side of the counter; what you read here is what held up after checking it against my own plants.
The community wiki, written by many growers and published under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 licence. We use its facts and reproduce none of its text or pictures.
@sanpedromastery6262 on YouTube
A hobby grower filming the same collection through two very different climates, which is where a lot of our seasonal numbers come from.
A one-person nursery in San Diego County filming its own practice in the open, in a climate close to this one.
Where growers argue things out in public. Useful for what actually goes wrong, and for seeing where opinion is split.
A Southern California nursery whose buyer guides and posted policies are the clearest record I found of what a cutting in the post should be like. They are also a competitor, and I read them as one.
And checked against
Growers know things nobody has written down, and those five are where that knowledge lives. But anything that can be checked against somebody who publishes under their own name and answers for it has been.
University of Arizona Cooperative Extension
A land-grant university's extension service, on sunburn and acclimation, freeze damage, planting depth, drainage, over-watering, rot and pests. Where this site and a forum disagree about water, this is the tiebreaker.
The Royal Horticultural Society
A national horticultural society's own growing guide: the watering year, the cool dry winter rest, mixes, pot size and how long a cut takes to callus.
A botanical garden's pest advice, written for cacti and succulents specifically — what mealybugs, scale, spider mites and root mealybugs look like, and what actually shifts them.
The International Plant Names Index
Kept jointly by Kew, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Australian National Herbarium. It is where the species names on this site were checked against the record of what has actually been published, and by whom.
Haseltonia, the yearbook of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America
Peer-reviewed taxonomy. The argument about macrogonus, pachanoi and peruvianus is settled in papers like this one, not in a comment thread, and this is the paper that made the change.
Nine more sit behind these pages the same way — extension horticulture from Illinois, South Carolina and two California counties, the Caryophyllales Network, the Desert Botanical Garden, a society’s grafting article and a journal paper on the family tree. Every one of them, and how much of this site rests on each, is on the sources page.
Every photograph on this site is of a plant grown in this yard — nobody else’s. The teaching pictures are drawings rather than photographs: a drawing can label the one thing it is teaching, hold two plants in the same light, and leave out everything that would only distract. And I will not tell you what your cactus is from a photograph: light, age and water change every feature people identify these plants by, so a photo is a hint and never a verdict.
Written from scratch off a cited fact list, never copied. Learned from the sanpedrocact.us community wiki (CC BY-NC 4.0), @sanpedromastery6262 and @IMDAVESBUD on YouTube, r/sanpedrocactus and medicactus.com's buyer guides, then checked against university extension horticulture, botanical gardens, cactus and succulent societies and the published botanical record. I will not name a plant from a photograph.
Every source behind this site →