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Althea seal. variegated skin, long spines recorded.

Peruvianus

Althea

Grown hereWell documented

Also written as Variegated Althea

Althea is a with the look growers associate with the Matucana region: heavy blue , thick columns and deeply notched ribs. It started life as a seedling of Icaros raised by David Siegfried, was sold on eBay to the grower GeeBee, and took its name from her. The behind that Icaros seed is not recorded, so its full is unknown.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

  • very blue farina
  • fat columns
  • seagull notching
  • woolly areoles

PeruvianusNamed clone: One original plant and every cutting taken from it, given a name by a grower.

Of the 16 things this page says, 5 name who reports them and 11 are marked as something we cannot confirm. Where a line is not settled, it says so underneath.

Added 23 Aug 2026

At a glance

Species

Trichocereus peruvianus

syn. Echinopsis peruviana

Filed under Peruvianus

Parent

Ikaros DNA

Seed parent: Ikaros DNA

Origin

GeeBee, the grower who bought the seedling and grew it out.

grown from seed

In the yard

We grow this one

none cut for sale right now

Family line

tap any name to visit it

Parents: Ikaros DNA, Peruvianus family, unconfirmed by our sources; Pollen parent not recorded. This cultivar: Althea.

Seed parentIkaros DNAPollen parentNot recordedAltheayou are here

Every ring is that plant’s own seal, in its family’s colour — open one to keep going.

Each plant wears its own seal here, coloured by its family — so a cross shows which side brought what before you read a name. A dashed ring is a plant with no page here yet, and a wire is only ever drawn from a parent somebody wrote down. Children are worked out from the other entries rather than stored on this one, so recording a cross anywhere lights it up on both plants.

The line matters as much as the box. A dashed line is a cross we can report but cannot confirm. Every cross drawn here is at that weakest reading, which is the true state of this plant's record.

Drawn 3 generations each way. Everything our sources record for this plant is in the drawing; the family stops there, not the tree.

Recorded only as an Icaros seedling, so the seed side is named and the side is not.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

The longer version

Siegfried sold it on eBay some years ago to the grower known as GeeBee, who grew it on and gave it the name Althea.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

A 2019 post by GeeBee records the first being taken from the plant.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

A Californian nursery holding a large batch of the same seed line names Althea among the plants that came out of it.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.That corroborates the seed line and nothing else — it does not name the grower who raised the seedling, so the attribution above still rests on the community wiki alone.Reported by one source, and not corroborated anywhere else.

A California nursery that grows it records the plant the same way — one of GeeBee's blue peruvianus selections — and adds the naming: it is named after a Grateful Dead song, as her other selections are.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

The same nursery describes that reads as almost single for a peruvianus: the radials stay short and, in a shaded garden, the centrals barely show at all, while a plant in steady direct sun still puts out spines of two to three inches.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

Where the name comes from

The plant began as a seedling raised from Icaros by David Siegfried, a member of the TTC community.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

Character

A bar is drawn only where one of the lines below states it — never from the species, never from a photograph.

  • Not documented yet.

  • nearly smooth to heavily spined: this one leans towards heavily spined, read from the spines line below.

  • Not documented yet.

Skin
Variegated and marbled.Reported by one source, and not corroborated anywhere else.Exceptionally blue farina is listed as one of its defining features.One source states this, and our house botanist has checked it. Strongly glaucous, very blue forms do occur, so a heavy farina is a usable distinguishing trait.
Ribs
The wiki page notes the deep seagull-style notching and very fat columns associated with Matucana-region peruvianus.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.
Spines
Each areole usually carries one moderately long central spine ringed by short ones.One source states this, and our house botanist has checked it. One longer central with a ring of shorter spines is a common areole pattern in the genus.
Growth habit
Areoles are described as fat and woolly on thick growth.One source states this, and our house botanist has checked it. Fat, woolly areoles on thick growth are typical, and areole wool increases with stem vigour.
Notes
A sought-after name on the sales subreddit: listed often, and by a wide spread of different sellers.Reported, but not confirmed.

What the sources say

Our own notes record the owner's Althea as variegated and marbled; the wiki page describes a blue, fat peruvianus and never mentions variegation, so the two accounts may not describe the same plant.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

Althea growing in the yard
Our own plant, in the yard. 3 pictures of it on its collection page.

Filed under the same family, Peruvianus. The better-documented ones come first.

Keep exploring

Cultivar histories in this hobby are passed between growers; where sources disagree we say so rather than pick a side.