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TJG (Tom Juul's Giant) seal. Plain ring: nothing here sets a rib count, a spine length or a growth form the ring can mark.

Pachanoi

TJG (Tom Juul's Giant)

Well documented

Also written as TJG, Tom Juul's Giant

Tom Juul's Giant is one of the better-documented old American , and what documents it is a chain of people rather than a botanical record. Tom Juul was a Danish-born butcher in San Francisco and a serious collector of rare cacti, who grew a very large in the garden until the end. The clone left that garden twice: first through a South Bay nursery that put it into circulation under the collector's name, and years later when a Bay Area collector rescued ahead of the bulldozers and passed them on, Sacred Succulents among the recipients.Reported, but not confirmed.

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

Of the 8 things this page says, 1 names who reports it and 7 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 pachanoi

syn. Echinopsis pachanoi

Filed under Pachanoi

Parents

Not recorded

No source names a mother or a father for this one.

Origin

It reached the hobby in two waves: first through a South Bay nursery, and years later when a Bay Area collector rescued cuttings from the garden before it was cleared and handed them on, Sacred Succulents among the recipients.

a line of cuttings

In the yard

Not in the yardAsk if you are after one

Family line

what the record holds

No source in this library records a cross for TJG (Tom Juul's Giant). Nobody names a mother or a father for it, and no other entry here names it as a parent.

That is the record, not an oversight: of the 749 names in this library, 693 have no recorded relation either. Most named clones were selected, cut and passed along without anyone writing down what they came out of. A parent goes in here when a source states it and never because a name looks like one — a wrong pedigree would travel further than a blank one, because pedigrees get copied.

If you know where it came from, tell us — a person reads everything before it appears.

The longer version

The clone was first put into circulation by Cactus Gem Nursery in the South Bay.Reported, but not confirmed.

Years later, after Juul died, the collector known in the hobby as Kakster saved cuttings from the garden before it was cleared and passed them to friends and customers, Sacred Succulents among them; several American nurseries then spread the clone, with Sacred Succulents doing most of it.Reported, but not confirmed.

Where the name comes from

Tom Juul was a rare-cactus collector in San Francisco who grew the plant in the garden there. The specialist reference adds that he was Danish by birth and a butcher by trade.Reported, but not confirmed.

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.

  • Not documented yet.

  • Not documented yet.

Nobody has described the skin, the ribs or the spines of this one anywhere we could cite, so there is nothing here to draw or to list.

What the sources say

How Juul came by the plant is not recorded. One account guesses at a University of California South American collecting expedition and at an Ecuadorian origin, and marks both as guesses. Material sold under this name is not all traceable. A California collector's clone reference keeps a second, separate label for Juul's plants whose line back to the original garden could not be confirmed, and warns that the label may cover more than one clone. Appearance will not settle it.Reported, but not confirmed.A separate entry in this library is filed under the bare name Juul's Giant. The accounts in hand read the two as one clone, but none of them says so outright, so the two entries stay separate and neither name is carried as an alias of the other.Reported by one source, and not corroborated anywhere else.

Drawing of a pachanoi-type column: broad, with low rounded ribs, almost no spines, and a small notch in the rib above each areole.
A Pachanoi column, drawn. We don't grow this one, and we will not borrow anybody else's photograph of it.

Filed under the same family, Pachanoi. 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.