Pachanoi
How a seal is made
Every plant draws its own mark
Nothing on a seal is decoration. The ring is the plant seen from above, and every mark on it stands for something a grower wrote down about that plant. No record, no mark — which is why so many of the rings on the wall are bare, and why a bare one is worth noticing rather than skipping. The mark never carries letters: a name is written out in full beside it, every time.
The mark above belongs to Juul's Giant. 6 ribs recorded, short spines recorded. Open that entry and you will find each of those on a line of its own, with the source beside it.
The anatomy
ticks around the edge = spination
bumps on the ring = rib count
- Bumps.
- One per rib, when a source states a count. A range like “five to seven” draws its low end, and the exact wording is on the entry.
- Ticks.
- More of them and longer as the spines get heavier. A plant recorded as spineless gets small dots instead — its areoles are there, its spines are not.
- Centre dot.
- The growing point. Every ring has one.
Growth forms change the ring
columnar
an ordinary ribbed column — almost every Trichocereus
monstrose
lumpy, with growing points wherever it likes
crested
the growing point has stretched into a fan
variegated
two skins at once, so the ring runs two tones
Read from the plant’s own name, its other names and the lines describing its skin, growth and habit — never from a sentence about what its seedlings do.
Colour is the species family
- Bridgesii
- Pachanoi
- Peruvianus
- Scopulicola
- Hybrid
- Other Trichocereus
- Other genus
A name we could not place at all wears the same grey, with a dashed edge and “name only” under it. The family is written out beside every seal, so the colour is a shortcut and never the only way to read one.
A plain grey ring is not an unfinished drawing. It means nobody has recorded this plant’s ribs, spines or growth form anywhere we could cite — and that is the one thing a designed icon could never tell you.
Why the marks are generated rather than designed
A wall of hand-drawn icons would look the same and mean nothing: it would tell you what a designer thought of a plant. These are built by a rule from the record, which has two consequences worth spelling out. A seal can be checked — open the entry and the trait line that put each mark there is printed with its source. And a seal can be empty, which no designed icon ever is. When you see a bare ring, nobody has written that plant down anywhere we could cite, and if you grow one we would like to hear from you.
The mark never replaces the name
There are no initials, codes or monograms anywhere in the library. A ring tells you what a plant is like; only its name tells you which plant it is. So the name is spelled out in full under every tile on the wall and beside the plate on every entry — “Psycho0 × Eileen”, never “P×E”. Nothing here is an abbreviation you have to learn before the library is any use to you.