The shop is closed just now. The shop is not open for orders yet. Everything here is real and grown in my own yard — have a look around — but I am not taking money until the last few things are in place. Ask about a plant

Mysterious Yard
Cart, empty

Sources

Where all of this came from

Nothing on this site is copied. Every guide and every cultivar entry was written from a fact list, with the source written down against each fact as it went in. This page is that list of sources, gathered in one place.

29 sources7,162 statements778 pages

How to read this

Every guide and every cultivar entry closes with a short “Learned from” list — the sources that page was written from. Behind that list sits a fact-by-fact record of which source taught me what; I keep that record for my own checking rather than printing a footnote beside every sentence. This page is the register seen from the other end: one entry per source, grouped by what it taught me, with a count of how much rests on it.

There are two kinds of source here and they do different jobs. Growers, the community wiki and the nurseries know things about named clones that are written down nowhere else, and for a plant’s story they are the only record there is. Extension horticulture, botanical gardens, cactus and succulent societies and the published botanical literature are the second kind: they do not know your clone, but they answer under their own name for how a cutting roots, what sunburn is, why a plant rots and what a species is actually called. Anything on this site that could be checked against the second kind has been, and where the two disagreed I went with the better-supported reading.

Links go to a channel, a subreddit, a published paper or the front page of a site — never to one video, one post or somebody else’s product page. That is deliberate. It is the level at which a citation is useful without pointing a shop’s traffic at one named person, and the facts are the part I took, not the writing.

None of them has endorsed this store, checked it, or heard of it. They are where I learned, and that is the whole of the relationship.

How much of this rests on one source

A long list of sources can make a library look better checked than it is, so here is the honest shape of it. In the cultivar library — 6,171 statements about named clones — 31.6% of every citation goes to sanpedrocact.us, the community Trichocereus wiki (CC BY-NC 4.0), and 90.5% of those statements rest on exactly one source. An entry in that position says so on its own page.

That is not a number I am pleased with, and it is not one that more botany fixes. Nobody has published a paper on who bred a named clone, and no herbarium keeps a specimen of one — the community is the primary record, and for most of these plants it is the only record. So the work is to keep finding second community voices: other clone registers, breeders speaking about their own plants, growers who will put their name to what they saw. Where I find one, it is named here and on the entry. Where I have not, the page says one account rather than pretending to a second.

Growing

Light, water, soil and pots; cold, pests and the things that go wrong.

Propagation

Cuttings and callusing, rooting, grafting, pups and seed.

Cultivars

Named clones — where a name came from, what the plant is said to look like, and where the record runs out.

Community

What buyers and sellers actually do: how a listing is written, what turns up in the post, and where growers disagree.

Two entries that are mine

The register holds two things that are not somebody else’s work, and they are kept apart from the list above so that no grower or site up there appears to be standing behind them.

My own reading of the facts
Where a line draws a conclusion from the facts above it rather than repeating something a source said, it is marked as mine. It is not a claim anyone else is making, and it should be read as one grower's reasoning. 1,362 statements on this site.
The labels these plants arrived with
Every name in the collection is the label the plant came to me with, recorded when it arrived. It is the only authority for a name on this site: I will not tell you what a cactus is from a photograph, and I will not name one from anybody else's. 178 statements on this site.

The standing note

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.

The community wiki is published under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 licence, which is a non-commercial one. This is a shop, so I do not rely on it: I take the facts, which nobody owns, name the wiki wherever I have used them, and reproduce none of its writing or its pictures. The same goes for everything else above.

Reading the guides themselves? Start at the learning hub.