New article.

[Guest Ramon]

I have put up a new article on the information contain in the Cactacea in Britton and Rose.

http://www.shaman-australis.com/visionaryc...richocereus.htm

I would appreciate any feedback especially critisms

[Guest wira]

I like the 'interactive' key at the bottom. I'm not sure if you noticed, but you didn't include a definition for 'oblanceolate'. Some of the terms used in botanical description are not too easy to translate into words. Explanatory diagrams might be good... but I'm more of the opinion that if someone is seriously interested in identifying plants, they should get themselves at least one good dictionary of botanical terminology, and learn all they can of their own volition

A couple of things - using the key requires a flowering plant, which makes it difficult to use. Of course flowers are essential in most cases for a definite i.d., but in cultivation many Tricho's may not flower too often, if at all, depending on the species, as you probably know. The other thing is that in real life, the existing taxonomic keys for Trichocereus do not perform too well. There is too much variation and the whole genus needs a good revision, especially in regards to peruvianus, macrogonus, and bridgesii, which are currently very loosely defined, and there is a whole spectrum of plants in cultivation that float between them. There also seems to be a fair bit of variation in species such as pasacana, atacamensis, terscheckii and taquimbalensis, all of which have similar traits [in smaller plants at least], though with these growth is very slow and it can be hard to know what they will turn in to when they get really big There is a lot of stuff being sold as pasacana that probably isn't pasacana, in my opinion.

That said, I think it's great that you have put this up, most people don't have access to any good cactus books like Britton & Rose's or Backeberg's stuff, so it's a great public service! At the moment it would be a monstrously difficult task to put together a Trichocereus key that worked in 100% of cases, but in the interim it is important to make publicly available what there is... and this is a good start

[rkundalini]

Ditto to wira's comments -- thanks for helping the spread of good information.

If you don't already have it you might want to read through Sacred Cacti with an eye to future additions. If you email the author, [email protected], I'm sure he'd be happy to give you his comments on what you have and what could be added.