Flower Friday : : Agave Flower Spike

"what on earth is that plant doing?", asked our neighbor as she drove by the other evening. It is almost embarrassingly phallic, but we prefer to liken it to an asparagus spear.  You can compare here how much it has grown since we first began to suspect that it was going to flower.

I love this giant toothy plant despite its tendency to bite.I have pictured it many times over the years in this journal for its symmetry, the way the fronds(?) imprint their silhouettes on each other and its unusual blue-grey color. We have a number of different species of agave, but this one is the biggest and most magnificent.It is sometimes called a century plant for the length of time it takes for it to bloom, although 20 to 40 years is probably closer. If it is pampered and given lots of water, which certainly happened this year, it will flower more quickly, so I guess the moral is that if you love your agave, be mean to it....

This mother plant has numerous babies nestled at her feet. In addition to those, we know that the flower stalk could grow as tall as twenty five feet and put out branches with clusters of small flowers which turn into dozens of small plants.. Eventually the mother, who has spent many years gathering the nutrients needed to grow this stalk, begins to die and can  no longer support it. It will sink to the ground widely scattering all the baby flower clusters . Having spent all her energy, and scattered her seeds, the mother plant will die.

We will be sad to lose this beautiful plant, and we are certainly wondering how we are going to give her a decent burial, but the weather is finally cooperating and we plan to sit back and enjoy the show while we wonder what to do with thousands of baby plants....