Trichocereus santiaguensis Monstrosa
Trichocereus santiaguensis monstrosa
The Trichocereus santiaguensis monstrosa is a nursery produced cultivar that sometimes shows up on websites like eBay.
Trichocereus santiaguensis is a regional variety of Trichocereus spachianus. And this clone has been floating around for at least 20 years. It sometimes is labeled Trichocereus pachanoi or Trichocereus bridgesii. And though the spination very rarely comes through, it makes it obvious that this is absolutely not a plant from the San Pedro group. The epidermis has a bright green color, which is typical for Trichocereus spachianus as well. If you are interested in seeds of Trichocereus spachianus, you can get some high quality seeds here:
The Tr. santiaguensis monstrose is probably a nursery produced mutant that was grown from Ritter´s Trichocereus santiaguensis seed. It is also called green pepperoni cactus, cereus pepperone, and so on. There only were very few collections of this plant and it would be surprising to hear if it is unrelated to the stuff that was collected by Friedrich Ritter. All the seeds I bought were dead as wood.
Now let´s summarize what this plant is synonymous with:
- Trichocereus spachianus monstrosa
- Trichocereus santiaguensis monstrosa
- Cereus santiaguensis monstrosa
- Cereus spachianus monstrosa
- Trichocereus santiaguensis monstrosa
- Echinopsis santiaguensis monstrosa
Please note that this is NOT synonymous with Trichocereus santaensis, which is a regional form of Trichocereus pachanoi or Trichocereus peruvianus that looks substantially different and originally comes from the Santa Valley in Peru.
I also seen this labeled Trichocereus santiagoensis monstruosa, but I rather think that this is some kind of a spelling error.
The plant grows mostly spineless and looks like a very thick spineless variety of a TBM. This plant is really rare and is not related to the two similar looking Lophocereus monstrosa cultivars that exist too.
The spines are light brown and look like the spines on a standard Spachianus.
I am not sure how it got into cultivation but it is believed that this is actually a nursery-produced cultivar. The plant is sometimes available in our Trichocereus Facebook Group and I recently saw quite a lot of them offered for sale.
