Cover for TRICHOCEREUS VOLUME 2 book Echinopsis cactus

Hey guys, I wanted to show this beautiful cover artwork that a designer made for the upcoming TRICHOCEREUS: VOLUME 2 book, the second volume and follow-up book to VOLUME 1.

I totally love this version of the cover and it´s possible that it´ll be the one that will be on the cover when the book is printed.
However, there´s still plenty of time, so it´s also possible that we´ll go with a different version in the end. So far, this is my favorite cover and I definitely had to share this with you guys.

TRICHOCEREUS VOLUME 2 will be a beautiful book and I think they cover makes that perfectly clear.
The book is about all kinds of Trichocereus hybrids related to Trichocereus pachanoi and also features an extensive chapter about San Pedro Hybrids with colored flowers and I am extremely proud that I can have it in the shop. This is going to be a one of a kind book that will be almost exclusively be available Indiegogo and we´re aiming for a release date around Christmas 2017.
There will be a limited special edition consisting of 50 or 100 copies and some other extras like shirts and postcards. All the Trichocereus designs that we made for the campaign are amazing and it kills me to sit on them for so long. So yeah, there´s some great stuff coming up soon, and we need your support to get it funded. It´s going to be a big event for Trichocereus Growers and Fans and there´s some stuff that you can´t miss out on.

If you want to be notified when the campaign goes live, just subscribe to my newsletter and I´ll send you a message as soon as this stuff is available on Indiegogo. https://trichocereus.net/newsletter

There are all kinds of Trichocereus hybrids out there and I am happy to show you a couple of the resulting crosses on this page. I will try to update this page as often as I can, to show you what others grew from a certain cross.

Now let me add a little bit of background info to give you an understanding how this breeding works in case you are completely new to this. Almost all Trichocereus species are self-sterile. That means that you need pollen from another plant to produce seed. The pollen donor needs to be genetically different from the receiver. Because of that, it´s not possible to cross two different cuttings from the same mother plant. If you list the parents of a cross, it looks something like this:
Trichocereus peruvianus x Trichocereus bridgesii
That simply means that the Peruvianus is the mother plant, while Trichocereus bridgesii is the Father. In most cases, the resulting offspring comes closer to the mother than to the father. However, there are a lot of exceptions to this and sometimes, the genes of the father are simply more dominant.
You can cross a whole lot of Trichos with each other and most of the crosses will work, if you did it right. But there are some crosses that just genetically don´t match. For example, the seedlings produced by that cross end up being variegated/albinos or simply die. That´s actually very common and can happen all the time. It happens the most when crossing plants like Hildewintera hybrids. And that´s probably because there werent many plants in the gene pool to begin with.

Most Trichocereus species have a white flower and apart from the extremely rare Trichocereus tulhuayacensis, all San Pedros are flowering white. Because of that, this community is trying to breed some San Pedros with colored flowers. There already are a handful of hybrids involving Echinopsis pachanoi with colored flowers. One such Trichocereus hybrid is called SAARWELLEN and the other one is AMUN-RE. But both Trichocereus hybrids are extremely rare.

Now, have a look at some of the photos of Trichocereus hybrids

Trichocereus validus Hybrid

Trichocereus terscheckii x  Trichocereus bridgesii ‘Psycho0’

Echinopsis terscheckii x Echinopsis pachanoi

 Trichocereus bridgesii ‘SS02’ x ‘Tom Juul´s Giant’

SS02 x Trichocereus bridgesii

Echinopsis peruviana ‘Sausage Plant’ x Trichocereus scopulicola

Echinopsis peruviana ‘ROSEI 1’ x OPEN

Pachanoi x SS02

Echinopsis pachanoi x J3

Echinopsis scopulicola ‘Super Pedro’ x J3

Trichocereus scopulicola ‘Super Pedro’ x  Trichocereus bridgesii ‘HB02’

Fields  x Rosei #1

Trichocereus bridgesii ‘SS02’ x Sierra Canyon

Trichocereus bridgesii SS02 x Trichocereus chiloensis

Psycho0 x Scopulicola

Luther Burbank x SS02

Sierra Blue x SS02

Echinopsis macrogona x Echinopsis scopulicola

Psycho0 x J2

Psycho0 x Open ‘Vishnu’

J3 – Trichocereus (Cactus Country)

J3 is one of the unlabeled hybrids that Jim Hall of Cactus Country grew. There is not really much known about this clone, and the parents are lost unfortunately. Most people that grow them label them “Peruvianus”. Nonetheless, the plant looks like it could also have Bridgesii relatives.I am pretty confident that there is a Trichocereus bridgesii / Echinopsis lageniformis somewhere in J3´s family tree, but I doubt that it´s actually a botanically pure one plant. 

Those three pics were donated by Michael Stillman and I will add a lot more to the database. All clones from cactus country, also known as J clones, are pretty rare and there only are a few of them in cultivation.

The following pics show hybrids in which this clone was used as a father.

SUPER PEDRO x J3. Though the latter was only the father, the offspring is very similar to it and only shows very little similarity to the Trichocereus scopulicola hybrid Super Pedro. Definitely an interesting plant.

This plant shows Trichocereus pachanoi x J3 and looks very much like the father too. Despite the fact that plants often look more like the mother. However, it seems to have very dominant genes when being used as father.