Named San Pedro & Trichocereus Clones: The Collector’s Guide

Walk any serious Trichocereus collection and almost nothing is labeled by species alone. Instead you get names — a person, a street, a nursery, a string of letters and a number. Those are clone names, and they’re the closest thing this hobby has to a catalog. Here’s what they mean, why growers chase them, and which ones we cut from our own California mother plants.

What a named clone actually is

Grow a hundred San Pedro from seed and you get a hundred slightly different plants — fat, skinny, blue, grass-green, some armed with three-inch spines and some nearly bare. That variability is the fun of growing from seed, and the opposite of what a collector wants when chasing a specific look.

A clone solves that. Every cutting off a single mother plant is genetically that plant. Cut a piece, root it, let it pup, cut those pups, and fifty years later the cactus in a garden three states away is still the same individual. So when someone says they have Cactus Kate, they aren’t naming a variety — they’re saying their plant traces back, cut by cut, to one specific cactus somebody decided was worth propagating.

Why the paper trail is the product

Because clones travel as cuttings passed between growers, the only thing separating a genuine piece from a lookalike is the chain of hands it came through. That’s why collectors ask where your mother plant came from before they ask the price, and why the hobby runs on oral history — nursery closures, estate sales, a neighbor’s front yard — written down decades after the fact.

We’ll be straight about the limits of that history. Some of these plants have a tidy documented line; others have a plausible story and a gap in the middle. Trichocereus species boundaries are genuinely blurry, and a plant sold for years as one species may look like its neighbor once it matures. Where a name is contested, we say so and sell under the collector convention everyone uses rather than pretending to a certainty nobody has.

Cactus Kate

The best story in the bunch, and the one most often told wrong. Kate ran the Watsonville, California nursery Desert Theatre, alongside her husband Jay Jackson. The couple later split; she kept the Watsonville operation while he started a similarly named nursery down in Escondido, which Brandon Bullard eventually took over and still runs today. Kate’s bridgesii sat largely unremarked while she was alive. Only after her death did Verne Robinson get hold of the material and put it into circulation — within a few years everyone in the hobby wanted a piece. The account is preserved in the community-maintained San Pedro Cactus Wiki entry for the clone, credited to nurseryman Lawrence Smith.

Here’s the honest part: nobody can say whether Cactus Kate is one clone or several. Kate grew plenty of Trichocereus bridgesii, and more than one of her plants may have been bundled under the same famous label as material spread. Buy it as a collector convention, not a fingerprint.

Visually you get a heavy blue-green to pale green column that throws multiple stems and builds into a thicket rather than a single spire. Mature stems carry five to seven ribs; young growth off a fresh pup often runs four or five before settling. Areoles sit proud of the surface with needle-shaped spines around one to three centimeters, whitish-grey through light brown — bright stitching against that waxy blue skin. Cactus Kate is sold out at the moment but returns seasonally, so join the drop list on the product page and you’ll hear before it goes public.

The TBM family

TBM is shorthand for Trichocereus bridgesii monstrose, the strangest thing most people will ever put in a pot. Instead of clean ribbed columns it produces lumpy, segmented, almost sculpted stems. It sells as lettered forms, and the letters are unreliable across regions — what one grower calls Clone A, another two states over calls something else. Judge the photo, not the letter.

Clone A is the long form: extended pups showing areoles for the first few inches, then smoothing into softly melted growth that ends in a blunt tip. Clone B is the short form, stubbier and thicker, piling into a dense bush as it ages. Clones C and D are rarer, both from a specialty succulent nursery, and only circulated widely through the 2020s.

Then there are the two forms collectors fight over. The crested (cristata) form abandons any pretense of order — wavy, bumpy fan growth studded with tiny terminated tips, no two alike. The variegated form breaks color, marbling cream and yellow through the green. Worth knowing before you buy either: this growth can revert. Long-form and crested plants have both been documented dropping back into normal ribbed columns and even flowering. It’s not a defect or a swindle, just something these plants do. Cut back to monstrose growth and let it repush.

We keep a crested TBM and a rooted TBM Clone B in rotation. The rooted option is the safer pick if you’ve never handled monstrose material — it establishes slower than an ordinary Trichocereus cutting and appreciates the head start.

La Mirada Angelo (LMA)

This one came out of a Southern California front yard rather than a nursery, and it’s our favorite kind of find. The stand is roughly thirty-five years old. It circulated for a while as La Mirada bridgesii before being renamed Angelo in memory of the homeowner’s late husband — she’ll tell you she thinks it’s an ugly plant, while everybody who sees it tells her the opposite.

The plant is distinctive without being loud. Upper sections go largely spineless, making it one of the easier big Trichocereus to plant near a path or a kid’s play area. Areoles are notched into the rib rather than sitting flat, and the spines that do appear start yellow and bleach toward white in full sun. As with many long-standing California yard plants, the species label is soft — we sell it under the name the community uses. LMA is in stock now, cut fresh for your order and callused here before it ships.

Ogunbodede ‘Ogun’, Psycho0 and SS02

Three clones where we’re the origin story rather than the historian. No wiki entry exists for these, so here’s what we can tell you from our own beds.

Ogun is a Trichocereus pachanoi that grows fast and upright, with the vigor that makes pachanoi the workhorse of the genus. Our mother plants sit outdoors year-round, so cuttings come off hardened and sun-tempered rather than greenhouse-soft. Ogun is between drops right now.

Psycho0 and SS02 are collector designations we acquired as cuttings and have grown out here since. We don’t have a documented chain of custody past our own supplier for either, and we’d rather say so than invent one. What we vouch for is the material: same outdoor beds, same full sun, same cut-to-order handling. Psycho0 and SS02 both return seasonally — join the drop list on either page.

Picking one for your yard

Cuttings, rooted plants, or seed

Most named clones leave here as fresh cuttings, cut for your order and callused for about two weeks before they ship rather than pulled from a bin — that’s the only way a clone travels. To skip the callus-and-wait stage, the rooted section gives you an established plant. Seed can’t reproduce a named clone, but hand-pollinated hybrid seed is how new ones get found. Shipping is flat-rate from $10, and our succulents ride along in the same box.

New to this? Start with rooting a cutting, then winter care before your first cold snap. Going the seed route instead, read the germination guide first.

One last note on what arrives. Our plants live outside in full California sun, so expect healed sun stress, the odd old bug mark, skin that shows a life. That’s a hard-grown plant, not a blemished one, and it establishes faster than anything raised under shade cloth.