Cactus book for identifying species

[Sankhara]

Greetings friends,

I'm a beginer. And because of that, i tryed to create an image database of cactus in my computer.

However, is not enought.

Does anyone knows about the title of any cactus good book for identifying species? Or does anyone has PDF books of cactus that would like to share.

Regards, Rodrigo

[daiv]

Here are some that I know of:
http://www.cactiguide.com/ref/

(you can never have too many sources -cross reference is key!)

[kika]

[peterb]

I often use a stack of books to ID a single plant in a photo. This is not always necessary, but it's helpful to have an array of different pictures of the "same" plant.

My favorites, even though the names of the plants have changed:

Cacti of the Southwest, Del Weniger
Cacti of the Southwest, Hubert Earle
Cacti of the US and Canada, Lyman Benson (I'm fortunate to have a library copy of this as it is $400 US used)
The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cacti, Innes and Glass
Cacti of Arizona, Lyman Benson
The Cactus Family, Ed Anderson
Cacti of the Trans Pecos, Powell and Weedin

Obviously, these are almost all US species books. I hear that the specialty books on Thelocactus, Coryphantha, Mammillaria and so on are very helpful as well. I don't know of a comprehensive reference on South American plants, but have paged through Backeberg's enormous lexicon as well as Borg's. (These are at the DBG library).

peterb

[vlani]

Try Preston-Mafham "cacti the illustrated dictionary" It is only $20 or so on Amazon and is a very good starting point. No columnars or opuntoides in there, some recent discoveries are missing as it was compiled in around 1990, but a great reference anyways.
They have another one on succulents and cacti but I've never had it.

If you are willing to spend $200 - or is it $300 now? get "the new cactus lexicon". Must be a good book, but I do not have it either.

[phil_SK]

I'm inclined to agree that for typical globular cacti, Preston-Mafham's Illustrated Dictionary has yet to be bettered. It includes a high proportion of names yet remains a picture book at heart.

Having said all that, I would never ID a plant having seen only one photo. I have dozens of books, many very basic or old ones with a few species pictured in each genus, and I look at a lot of websites. After 25 years of growing and reading, there are still many many plants I couldn't ID beyond genus level, if that.

[Sankhara]

Hi

This is an enormous help =)

Defenetly, the new cactus lexicon is a book that should be a treasure. Sorry for being so expensive.

Anyway, is out of order on Both Amazon from UK and US.

I will search for all of the books you advise and see what is best.

Thank you for all the help,

[CoronaCactus]

I use *The Cactus Family* by Ed Anderson quite often for research. It's really good, but not spectacular for ID purposes, as the pics are somewhat limited. But i use it alot for names and descriptions of the plants. It's not cheap and somewhat hard to find now, but it's a worthy book for cacti enthusiasts.

I totally agree with Phil, more books, with more pics the better. I also have several other books i use. But they are general cacti books. I'm looking at getting into the more specific genus books now.

[daiv]

I'm looking at getting into the more specific genus books now.

Yeah, that's what I've been doing.

Still want to get a hold of Pilbeam's "Thelocactus" from the Cactus File Handbook series.

Anybody have a spare copy of that for sale???