Hello, My mother has had this cactus growing robustly in her back yard for twenty years. She has always wanted to know what it's name/type is, and asked if I could figure it out online. I did some research, but everything looked the same to me. Wondered if you guys could lend a hand =) Here's some photographs of it. It's been at her house in Southern California since she moved there. Thanks so much!
That looks to me like Cereus peruvianus (Peruvian Torch) or Cereus pachanoi (San Pedro Cactus), probably the former. Synonyms are Trichocereus peruvianus and Trichocereus pachanoi.
wrong on many levels. first, NOT Synonyms second, theres NO such thing as "Cereus pachanoi" the genus "Trichocereus" is actually "Echinopsis" "Cereus" is an entirely different and distinct columnar. "Cereus peruvianus " is NOT "Peruvian Torch" It is "Peruvian apple" or "night blooming cereus" it has nothing to do with the similar sounding "Trichocereus peruvianus" Trichocereus peruvianus may be the same species as Trichocereus macrogonus. The only cactus called "san pedro" is Trichocereus pachanoi. Currently, proper nomenclature is "Echinopsis Pachanoi" The cacti above are not ambiguous in their genus, they are of the genus Cereus. The species is likely Peruvianus. Synonyms are ONLY acceptable when the name is question isn't that of a distinctly other species. For example, When the Genus "Trichocereus" was officially lumped back into "Echinopsis", The species "Trichocereus bridgesii" could not simply be changed to "Echinopsis bridgesii" because such a species already existed. So now the proper name for "Trichocereus bridgesii" is "Echinopsis lageniformis" To say "Echinopsis bridgesii" when referring to the organism represented by the first two synonyms, subsequently would be incorrect.
I stopped posting on this forum a while back after it occurred to me that people here don't really care about the scientific names, only the common ones. I guess in the end, we both felt it was the same thing--Cereus peruvianus. Whatever that really means. There have been so many cultivars of Cereus and Echinopsis, how can anyone keep them straight? Night Blooming Cereus? No confusion with that common name. Give me a break!
Well, Tumamoc may be wrong about the common name Peruvian Torch (though there is no standard for common names so who's to say), but Cereus pachanoi is most certainly a name, listed in International Plant Names Index as a synonym of Trichocereus pachanoi.
