"More than YOU want to know?
Three images shared by Michael Smith of short-spined Trichocereus pachanoi growing in Ecuador.
Spine length can be extremely variable so it surprisingly can often be a feature that does not help much with species assignment in this area. (Trichocereus peruvianus similarly expresses a range of spination from short to long.)
Smith’s observations
with excerpts from some published descriptions.
Topic 1: Backeberg’s clone
Topic 2: pachanoi compared to pachanot.
Additional material to ponder:
Copyright © by Keeper Trout
The images on this page show pachanot production in a large wholesale commercial nursery operation in southern California. These are produced in bulk as pristine high-quality new-growth tips that are sold as unrooted but healed cuttings to many retail nurseries. Their customers typically then root them, sometimes then growing them out into various sizes of nursery pots, and then resell them as their nursery stock. I’ll bet that many readers in the USA have actually seen these people’s material in their local big chain home improvement centers.
If this was hybrid, whether produced by a horticulturalist’s hands or encountered in the wild, it would be hard for any professional cactus grower to not recognize it as a serious potential money maker due to its features of not just having a growth rate driven by hybrid vigor but possessing large, showy and pleasantly fragrant flowers that occurred reliably and abundantly in almost any mild to moderate temperate climate, its habit of freely branching into multicolumn specimens, a highly favorable responsiveness and toleration to cuttings being taken, and its high water tolerance with no moderate drought and freeze hardiness.
Photographs © copyright by Anonymous;
reproduced with permission by Trout’s Notes
Smith’s observations
with excerpts from some published descriptions.
Topic 1: Backeberg’s clone
Topic 2: pachanoi compared to pachanot.
Additional material to ponder:
H 79960 Trichocereus aff. bridgesii growing in a private collection in Monrovia, California.
The plant shown above was obtained from the Huntington (with their permission and assistance).
Smith’s observations
with excerpts from some published descriptions.
Topic 1: Backeberg’s clone
Topic 2: pachanoi compared to pachanot.
Additional material to ponder:
Copyright © by Keeper Trout
Cochabamba, Bolivia holds at least one fascinating Trichocereus pachanoi form.
These are apparently propagated by a convent.
Photographs are copyright by Dani; reproduced with permission.
My THANKS to Michael S. Smith for noticing these
and for obtaining permission for their inclusion!
A closer view of a spiny Trichocereus pachanoi cultivated at Quito, Ecuador.
Both long and short spined forms of pachanoi are common in Ecuador (similar to the picture in Peru). It has been proposed that the short spined versions were developed by human selection but as far as I can tell this is entirely still speculative.
Image copyright by Hubbie Smidlak 2008;
reproduced with permission by Trout’s Notes
More pachanoi at Quito, Ecuador
pachanoi at Vilcabamba, Ecuador
pachanoi in Peru
pachanoi in Bolivia
Smith’s observations
with excerpts from some published descriptions.
Topic 1: Backeberg’s clone
Topic 2: pachanoi compared to pachanot.
Additional material to ponder:
These are cuttings of a bona fide Trichocereus pachanoi from Peru that were harvested at Matucana and then shipped to the USA. These provided the botanical material that was analyzed by Olabode Ogunbodede; with results published in the 15 September 2010 issue of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology (Volume 131, Issue 2, Pages 356–362).
These tips spent some months inside of a box traveling through the postal system. Obtaining these cuttings proved to be a surreal adventure as it took well over a year with many convolutions including the final delivery lacking identification labels and documentation. It was nothing short of a minor miracle that successful delivery was actually realized.
Smith’s observations
with excerpts from some published descriptions.
Topic 1: Backeberg’s clone
Topic 2: pachanoi compared to pachanot.
Additional material to ponder:
The new growth on a pachanot.
This is a very typical new tip for a pachanot. Its no surprise this plant is so widely loved for its beauty.
Smith’s observations
with excerpts from some published descriptions.
Topic 1: Backeberg’s clone
Topic 2: pachanoi compared to pachanot.
Additional material to ponder:
Copyright © by Keeper Trout
Quito, Ecuador has a number of forms of Trichocereus pachanoi in cultivation. As we already have seen, and will be seeing again, a similar story exists in Peru.
I’ll suggest to readers that it is best to try and have some fun with this and try to resist drawing conclusions as long as you can. It is valuable to not get distracted by the variable degree of spination and different vegetative body morphologies. They are worth gaining familiarity with so the plants can be recognized when encountered but in this instance it is the flowers and the fruit that are actually helpful for illumination.
Take some time to study the images in this article and after a while some of the things to focus on should start to resolve.
All images above are of Trichocereus pachanoi growing at Quito.
Some more Trichocereus pachanoi in Ecuador
Photographs copyright by Hubbie Smidlak 2008
Smith’s observations
with excerpts from some published descriptions.
Topic 1: Backeberg’s clone
Topic 2: pachanoi compared to pachanot.
Additional material to ponder:
Trichocereus bridgesii compared to our pachanot.
All of this set of images were taken of plants growing in Sonoma or Mendocino County, California.
In the first image the pachanot is on top, in the lower two images Trichocereus bridgesii is on top.
This last example shows the blackest wooly hair we have thusfar encountered on a pachanot flower. (See some short blackish hairs.)
See images of a few of bridgesii’s many forms
There are plenty of pictures of bona fide Trichocereus pachanoi flowers included in this article that can be compared to these two as well.
Things to notice: the degree and nature of hairs arising from the axils of the scales on the flowers, the appearance of the ovary and its degree of hairiness, the appearance of the scales and also the appearance of the sepals when the flower is fully open. If a person can view them first-hand or have matching pairs of images a lot more can be seen inside of the flower but this is not reliable from photographs. One thing that might be overlooked if unfamiliar with these plants is that in most cases only night-time or early morning images show undamaged interiors. Typically, as early as it is possible to get out and about, honey-bees or some other type of bee will start stripping them of all possible pollen leaving the stigma knocked down or to one side and the interior series of stamens sort of trampled in appearance. Sometime extremely so. Understanding this has occurred is really important if wanting to make sense out of comparing the interior flower parts.
This taken together with other observations of the morphology of their stems, spination & fruit, and reflection on the difference between those two sets on the interesting hybridization page lead me to suspect that the pachanot might be a hybrid between Trichocereus bridgesii and a Trichocereus pachanoi. At the very least those F1 hybrid sets suggest that the pachanot had something somewhere in its lineage that formed some rather familiar long yellow spines.
Assuming for a moment that it is a hybrid, it is also potentially possible that it was of natural occurrence, many naturally occurring cactus hybrids are known. One other plausible possibility is that it is a hybrid produced by a horticulturalist’s hands which they recognized for being a potential money maker and started its mass propagation and distribution.
The volume and extent of its distribution makes it clear that it entered horticulture through the hands of a major commercial grower so it is possible that there may still be a paper-trail (or someone’s memory) taking it back to its origin — assuming a person can first identify the point of entry into horticulture and all of the records or neurons involved are not already turned to dust. Maybe this will be found interesting enough to someday be looked into using DNA testing but for most botanists this is going to be a really trivial issue.
Some tangential images as well as the obviously pertinent ones may also shed some light on the subject of hybrids. You have no doubt already noticed the hybrid page but just to be sure here is another link.
Also it might be found interesting and useful to compare the flowers from assorted Trichocereus that appear to be closely related
Smith’s observations
with excerpts from some published descriptions.
Topic 1: Backeberg’s clone
Topic 2: pachanoi compared to pachanot.
Additional material to ponder:
Copyright © by Keeper Trout