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Tucson fat seal. Plain ring: nothing here sets a rib count, a spine length or a growth form the ring can mark.

Other Trichocereus

Tucson fat

Well documented

Tucson fat is a thick, fast, easily rooted propagated from a large mother stand at a Tucson nursery, having been grown first by a local gardener. Its deeper history is the interesting part: growers link it to a New Mexico Cactus Research distribution, with a recorded tag pointing back to the FR991 collection and seven sister plants. Whether the plant is best read as a or as one of those scopulicola siblings is not settled on the wiki page.Reported, but not confirmed.

  • very fat
  • fast growing
  • roots easily
  • climate tolerant

Other TrichocereusInformal label: Shorthand or a describing label rather than a cultivar name. It does not promise one specific plant.

Of the 13 things this page says, 3 name who reports them and 10 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

Not recorded

No botanical name on file. What the sources do say about its species is in the writing below.

Filed under Other Trichocereus

Parents

Not recorded

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

Origin

The clone is tied to the nursery Plants for the Southwest in Tucson, Arizona, where the owner Gene Joseph keeps a large mother stand for cuttings.

no source says whether it is seed-grown or a cutting line

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 Tucson fat. 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

Species, as our sources record it: , discussed as having either T. pachanoi or T. scopulicola character.Reported by one source, and not corroborated anywhere else.

By that account the original plant was raised by another Tucson gardener before the nursery took it on.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

Community discussion links its history to New Mexico Cactus Research seed distributions, and one grower reports a tag reading NMCR S1438/7 I:FR991 alongside seven sister plants.Reported, but not confirmed.

The same grower says of two of those siblings were traded with a Northern California grower in the late 1990s.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

Where the name comes from

The clone is tied to the nursery Plants for the Southwest in Tucson, Arizona, where the owner Gene Joseph keeps a large mother stand for cuttings.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.

Growth habit
Thick-stemmed and genuinely fat, with columns reported at 25 inches and more.Reported, but not confirmed.High, with plants passing two feet soon after they establish.One source states this, and our house botanist has checked it. These columnar cacti grow fast once rooted, so two feet early on is well within range.
Notes
Propagation: cuttings root readily.One source states this, and our house botanist has checked it. Cuttings of this genus callus and root readily; standard practice.Climate: it has grown well both in arid Tucson and in the cooler, damper air of Northern California.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

What the sources say

The wiki page describes it as pachanoi-like in one place and discusses it as an FR991 scopulicola sibling in another, without resolving which it is.Reported, but not confirmed.The wiki page is bot-compiled and unverified. A nursery selling the clone reports the same unsettled question and adds a third candidate name to it, saying plainly that it is not worth getting hung up on which. That is a second, independent record of the uncertainty, not a resolution of it.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

Drawing of two plain Trichocereus columns of different heights, standing for the wider genus rather than one plant.
A Trichocereus column, drawn. We don't grow this one, and we will not borrow anybody else's photograph of it.

Filed under the same family, Other Trichocereus. 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.