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

Pachanoi

Verne's Juul's Giant

Well documented

Also written as Verne's Spineless Mac, VSM, JS147

Verne's Juul's Giant is a blue-green, near-spineless with an unusually complete paper trail: taken in 1986 from a Watsonville grower, tips salvaged after the 1989 earthquake, and the last of her plants recovered in 2006. Growers rate it for cold tolerance, taking several days below freezing when kept dry. Whether it is the same plant as two other circulating names is argued over on the wiki page.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

  • blue-green skin
  • thick ribs
  • near spineless
  • cold hardy

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

Of the 13 things this page says, 1 is something several independent sources agree on, 3 name who reports them and 9 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 comes out of the Mountain View, California collection kept by the late grower Verne, who traded as Verne's Cactus.

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 Verne's 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

Species, as our sources record it: pachanoi, a Juulsoid .

Verne's first cuttings came in 1986 from Kate, a grower based in Watsonville, California.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

After the 1989 earthquake brought down many of Kate's large plants, Verne rescued the toppled tips and put them in the ground at home.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

Kate died in 2003, and in 2006 Verne recovered what remained at her nursery.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

Where the name comes from

It comes out of the Mountain View, California collection kept by the late grower Verne, who traded as Verne's Cactus.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.

Skin
Strikingly blue-green.One source states this, and our house botanist has checked it. A strongly glaucous blue-green skin is a normal colour form here.
Ribs
Thick.One source states this, and our house botanist has checked it. Thick stems are within the ordinary range for the genus.
Spines
Mostly absent or much reduced, as expected of the Tom Juul's Giant type.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.
Notes
Cold: it takes several days below 0 C (32 F) provided the soil stays dry, and some growers cover the growing tips during hard freezes in unheated greenhouses.One source states this, and our house botanist has checked it. Dry-cold tolerance to a few days of frost, with tips protected, matches the genus's normal hardiness.

What the sources say

Some growers hold that this , 'Verne's Spineless Mac' and the eBay designation JS147 are one and the same; the wiki page's expert view is that it is simply the authentic Tom Juul's Giant, and notes Verne never wrote about a spineless mac in the catalogue.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.The seller behind JS147 listed it as a spineless hybrid without mentioning Verne at all.Reported, but not confirmed.The wiki page is bot-compiled and unverified.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.

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.