What are your favourite books on cactii/plants?

Interested to hear about peoples favourite books on plants..

I want to read up on more cactii but favourites in my library so far are:

*Pharmarko trilogy - Dale Pendell
*Narcotic Plants - William Embodden
*Traditional Bush Medicines - An Aboriginal Pharmocopoeia - Andy Barr
*Bushfires and Bushtucker - Peter Latz

Any recommendations for cactii reads?
There seems to be one by Trout and not a whole lot more that is instantly apparent?
Is the Trout one any good?

I have not read the trout book, i was trying to find out what it looked like, is it with the san perdo cover?

Some great books i have are.

Haworthia- Rudolf Schulz. very good
Agaves- Greg Starr. Very good for my first Agave book, there's not may books but am happy with it.

MY Bible would have to be Teratopia- Gordon Rowley. This is the best book i have so far.
Its the ultimate book for me as it has everything i want!! lol

Hey Ricky,

Yeah it has the san pedro on the cover, could be good, seems to be a shortage of publications within this area.

Teriatopia sounds like one to keep an eye out for!

There are many books dedicated to cacti, I guess you need to think about what it is you want to know. If it is just general cultivation of 'cacti and succulents' then there are a heap of books that will give general information. The issue (the fun) with cacti is many of them require vastly different growing strategies and techniques and you many find you need quite a few books to master them all.

Here is a link to a general book that I have heard is quite good
The Complete Illustrated Guide to Growing Cacti & Succulents

If you are seeking a book for ID purposes there are a few good one's out there however I would suggest some of the on-line sites dedicated to ID such as http://cactiguide.com/ for example are a good place to start and they are free.

Based on your other books, Trout's work may appeal to you however some of the content in his work is not to be discussed on this forum. Please read the forum rules particularly rule number 4.


So to give us a better understanding of what may suit you do you have any particular species interests? Or would you like us to suggest a few species for you to investigate and find your passion ?

Regards,
HN

Great cover art fantastic alien-like utopian plants...

I'm just interested in general to hear about people's favourites
I need to learn more about caring for cactii, my trichocereus are not looking too good at the moment.
Thinking about getting some more smaller visually interesting button or crested varieties if I see any.
But if anyone has any really early pre 1960s books or any that are really well illustrated/good diagrams, good covers, lets hear about them!

I new i had a few old cactus book.

I just went and checked.

The first photo has books from 1959-65.
Second are from 1931 and 1943.

Some real old books there, i never used them much for info but they are very nice to have in the book collection.

Ok here is what I'm interested in;
I have always wanted this book but I just never got around to buying it....Some truly amazing plants in this book however not exactly for beginners but certainly a look into what is possible to through playing with genetics. Particularly F2 hybrids and Back-crossing.

LOCO CACTI

Hmmmm!!
Not these???   

Hehe yes those !! You lucky bugger. Some good reading I bet?

I bought those two by Brett and Hadley Nation and was quite disappointed. Much of the text was just cut and pasted from eBay listings. Very little if any in depth info, what a shame to do such a poor job with a such a fascinating and progressive area of the hobby. I guess they were published off a laptop and printed at somewhere like Officeworks. The author got hassled quite a bit by people who felt the same way. His response was it was project he and his daughter did for fun and better than nothing....personally I would say not doing the subject justice is slightly worse than nothing...
For cacti I still like Anderson's The Cactus Family the best.
For entertaining writing and mind bending vocabulary anything by Steven Hammer is great.
For insomnia I find a few pages of Cole's Lithops book is the perfect sleep inducer, but also an excellent info resource.

Great photos!

What is Cactus Culture - Scholtz like?

I also remember there was a download link floating around a while ago, that had some really great old school books by Britton & Rose etc, in ebook Pdf format. I will see if I can dig it up.

Can't find the Ebook package I was speaking of, however this is a must read for anyone into Cacti;

The Cactaceae by Britton & Rose. This site has all 4 volumes to either read online or download. All of it is quite old but had been researched extremely well.

http://www.cactuspro.com/biblio/en:britton_et_rose

The Cactaceae has got to be my current favourite for the diversity of the cactus family, especially for the groups that are not very popular with growers, like Cereus, Stenocereus and Hylocereus.

Hey Powerinformation,

The Cactus Culture by Schulz is good for a book of its age, i think back in the day it would have been great as i don't think there would have been that much info around in the 40s, some nice old black and white pictures as well.

As for Loco cactus and Superkabuto and Rare Astrophytum, they are nice to look at, some great pictures in it, but as cryptocarpa mentioned it could have more information in it and i agree.

The Cactus Family is very good, very big and very thick!!!! Jamb packed with everything you need.
I think its the guy for the sag in my book shelve!!

Went to the state library the other day and picked up

The Cactus Primer - Gibson/Nobel

Excellent book lots of information, quality effort

Bit late to this thread, but I have to admit I'm a C&S book junkie, with well over 100 in my library and that's not counting journals and stuff. Unfortunately a lot of the more recent books seem to be less specialist and just a bit too general for my likes, rehashing the same species and cultural info over and over again, becoming more aimed towards the patio grower than the collector. For advanced hobbyists, as Crypto suggested, Andersons book is great, and if you're delving into names etc of course the Cactus Lexicon is the bees knees, but both are a bit pricey and the Lexicon has zero cultural info. There are also a lot of very good Genus or locality specific books that have been written over the years.

If you can manage to find these below, they were what I cut my teeth on many moons ago. Great introductory books with some real collector/specialist info and stories in them. Reckon I wore out the print on these as I read them so many times when I got started. I'm guessing some are no longer in print, but you might find them s/h or in your club library.

IMG_4220 (Large) by Navajoa, on Flickr

IMG_4221 (Large) by Navajoa, on Flickr