It's hard to imagine how large
Trichocereus Pachanoi will become when you only have specimens in a
flower pot. Yet a single cutting will cluster more columns from its
base as it grows up. Eventually a stand will reach 14 feet
with the mass of an automobile.
At 24'' to 36" tall I plant them outdoors by digging a pit
backfilled with sandy compost. As they root into an unlimited size container (the earth) they grow
larger much faster. In a few years they become a cluster of columns
as tall as a person. Then I transplant to a permanent location.
Kate Jackson lived in Watsonville, California where she had ran
Desert Theatre selling cactus & succulents. She propagated cuttings
brought back from Peru by a botanist in the 1960's.
When I met her in 1986
she already had a huge stand of plants from which she took cuttings. The
photos above show an old plant that had been growing for decades. That is a single plant in the front of her nursery, I
didn't photograph the larger group in the middle of the 1-acre property.
Kate sold me my first San Pedro cuttings in 1986, teaching me how to propagate
them.
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The Loma Prieta Earthquake
In October, 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake toppled the Oakland
Freeway, a portion of the SF Bay Bridge, and destroyed apartments in
the Marina district of San Francisco. That was 50 north. Kate's nursery was
tens of miles closer; the ground shaking snapped off dozens of tall tips.
She called me to drive down and load up my car. Today I have thousands of
plants directly descended from this great "mother plant."
Kate died in 2003. I rescued many of her dying specimens in 2006. By then
her plant nursery was a weed choked ghost town.
While alive, Kate was a bright & lively spirit. She gave me a gift of knowledge
about how to root San Pedro. After her death I took the spiritual essence
of both that knowledge and the living plants to create thousands of
specimens.
Under a workbench, in the ghost town like nursery Desert Theatre had
become, lay a string of brass bells from Tibet. These once chimed,
when Kate lived. Today they hang from my deck with a prism crystal
attached to the end of the bunch. Every time I go by them I swing
the crystal so the bells make their music. And I thank Kate's
spirit for the enduring gift she left to all of us. |
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| My San Pedro patch on Granada Drive in Mountain View,
California. Circa 1995. |
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| This patch was planted with the car load of tips that
were snapped off Kate's San Pedro during the Loma Prieta
Earthquake. |
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