Reference
The species
Nearly everything on this site is one of four species, or a cross between two of them. They are told apart on four features — how many ribs, how far apart the areoles sit, what the spines do, and what the skin looks like — and each page below works through them in that order.
Every feature on this page moves with age, sun and water: a thirsty plant in hard light grows longer spines and a heavier bloom than the same clone in the shade. None of it settles an identity on its own, a clone name is not proof of a species, and a photograph is a pointer rather than an answer.
Pachanoi
The plain green San Pedro column most people picture.
73 in the library6 in the yard1 for sale
Bridgesii
The slim one, with few ribs and long needle spines.
86 in the library13 in the yard9 for sale
Peruvianus
The stout blue one, with bigger areoles and longer spines.
35 in the library2 in the yard1 for sale
Scopulicola
Very few ribs, no spines, and a glossy melted-looking skin.
23 in the library
The rest of the genus, by name
The four above are the species almost everything on this site belongs to. These eight are the other names the trade actually uses. They are not library groupings — each one is a reference page about the name itself: who published it, and what has been collected in the wild under it.
Macrogonus
The name at the centre of the argument about what everything else is called.
Terscheckii
The heavily armed giant — and, under the current treatment, not a Trichocereus at all.
Validus
A published name that the current treatment folds into another one.
Cuzcoensis
A Peruvian species that has absorbed several other names.
Knuthianus
A published name that covers more than one plant in the trade.
Santaensis
Named for the valley it was collected in, on the Peruvian side.
Spachianus
Old published name, very thin field record, widely used as stock.
Huanucoensis
A name the trade uses constantly and the botanical record does not carry.
A note on the names
A 2012 revision reads Salm-Dyck's original description of Cereus macrogonus as the plant later named Trichocereus peruvianus, and fixes the identity by designating a neotype.Reported by one source, and not corroborated anywhere else.
Under recent revisions macrogonus is the older and therefore senior name: San Pedro sits beneath it as a variety, and a good deal of what the trade sells as peruvianus is absorbed too.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.
Growers have carried on using the name loosely regardless, for almost any stout, blue, well-armed column.Too little stands behind this for us to confirm it.
This library uses all three names too, and does not settle which reading is right. The authorities genuinely disagree, and a label nobody uses helps nobody find a plant.
The three that are not species
The library needs somewhere to put a name it cannot place under one of the four, and these are those places. Filing a plant here is a statement about the record, not about the plant.
Sources
How this hub was written
Nothing here is copied. Every page was written from a fact list I built by reading, watching and cross-checking the sources below, with each fact tagged to where it came from. I keep that fact-by-fact record on my side of the counter; what you read here is what held up after checking it against my own plants.
The community wiki, written by many growers and published under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 licence. We use its facts and reproduce none of its text or pictures.
@sanpedromastery6262 on YouTube
A hobby grower filming the same collection through two very different climates, which is where a lot of our seasonal numbers come from.
A one-person nursery in San Diego County filming its own practice in the open, in a climate close to this one.
Where growers argue things out in public. Useful for what actually goes wrong, and for seeing where opinion is split.
A Southern California nursery whose buyer guides and posted policies are the clearest record I found of what a cutting in the post should be like. They are also a competitor, and I read them as one.
And checked against
Growers know things nobody has written down, and those five are where that knowledge lives. But anything that can be checked against somebody who publishes under their own name and answers for it has been.
University of Arizona Cooperative Extension
A land-grant university's extension service, on sunburn and acclimation, freeze damage, planting depth, drainage, over-watering, rot and pests. Where this site and a forum disagree about water, this is the tiebreaker.
The Royal Horticultural Society
A national horticultural society's own growing guide: the watering year, the cool dry winter rest, mixes, pot size and how long a cut takes to callus.
A botanical garden's pest advice, written for cacti and succulents specifically — what mealybugs, scale, spider mites and root mealybugs look like, and what actually shifts them.
The International Plant Names Index
Kept jointly by Kew, the Harvard University Herbaria and the Australian National Herbarium. It is where the species names on this site were checked against the record of what has actually been published, and by whom.
Haseltonia, the yearbook of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America
Peer-reviewed taxonomy. The argument about macrogonus, pachanoi and peruvianus is settled in papers like this one, not in a comment thread, and this is the paper that made the change.
Nine more sit behind these pages the same way — extension horticulture from Illinois, South Carolina and two California counties, the Caryophyllales Network, the Desert Botanical Garden, a society’s grafting article and a journal paper on the family tree. Every one of them, and how much of this site rests on each, is on the sources page.
Every photograph on this site is of a plant grown in this yard — nobody else’s. The teaching pictures are drawings rather than photographs: a drawing can label the one thing it is teaching, hold two plants in the same light, and leave out everything that would only distract. And I will not tell you what your cactus is from a photograph: light, age and water change every feature people identify these plants by, so a photo is a hint and never a verdict.
Written from scratch off a cited fact list, never copied. Learned from the sanpedrocact.us community wiki (CC BY-NC 4.0), @sanpedromastery6262 and @IMDAVESBUD on YouTube, r/sanpedrocactus and medicactus.com's buyer guides, then checked against university extension horticulture, botanical gardens, cactus and succulent societies and the published botanical record. I will not name a plant from a photograph.
Every source behind this site →