A leaf unfolds, and then the one beneath it, bearing the imprint of the first. Each Agave leaf displays its history in permanent tracery. The rosette unfolds but does not forsake its bundled origin. The more open the Agave, the more formidable. Clasping itself tight it presents little threat to those who would wrest it from the ground. Relaxed, reflexed, it greets the world with daggers, dozens of them. I have been diggng them out of the yard the last few weeks, one offset after another revealing itself as I look beneath the shrubs. Turn your back and they are three feet across. Their mothers, a blue Agave americana and a yellow-striped A. americana medio-picta, were not much larger when I planted them here four years ago. Now? I have driven vehicles smaller than the variegated one. Two more years an the front garden would have been permanently impenetrable. I broke two shovels digging out the pups, clumsily ramming shins and elbows into wicked terminal spines. I resorted to my usual gardening tool: the eight foot length of 4X4 and cinderblock fulcrum. I now have about two dozen 50 dollar Agaves scattered around the yard, unmoored.
It isn’t just the terminal spines that cause grief: the leaf edges bear thorns capable of tearing leather. I have had to thrust my arms deep into nests of Agave a hundred times this month. My forearms bear the scars of Agave leaves, and I wait to see what from within them will unfold in turn.
Most of the Agaves in the yard sit contained, more decorously, in pots. Agave felgeri, a thicket of six-inch awls, found in a one-gallon pot at a plant sale in Tucson the day after I spoke with Felger himself at a party. Bringing the plant home seemed auspicious. There are a few others, an A. utahensis eborispina (the species with the northernmost range) and a couple little Agave coloratas and an A. titanota and an Agave ferdinandi-regis, and I doubt whether their roots will ever taste soil as there is no room in the front garden. Admittedly, I lifted the pot with the A. felgeri this morning and found it had sent at least a foot of root out the drainage hole and into the sand path where it has lived these last two years. An Agave parryi huachucensis rounds out the potted collection, and there’s another parryi of unknown origin merrily colonizing five square feet of yard with its pups, an A. parrasana doing the same across the path, and an Agave tequilensis hiding under the flannelbush. Two sad roots of Agave filifera dry out in the gravel, saved at the last minute from root rot and I ought to put some potting soil aroound them.
A forest of names meaning little to anyone but the enthusiast, and even the enthusiast can find it hard to recall the difference betwen a titanota and a potatorum. (Every Agave expert you’re likely to run into would call the plant in the photo above an Agave scabra, though it’s actually an Agave asperrima.) I might have found myself collecting manzanitas or Ceanothus, buckwheats or native bulbs, populating my garden with an equally impenetrable thicket of their names. I find as much to admire in a Ceanothus as in an Agave, so why the concentration?
Part of it is that the question is misleading. I do have all those other plants in my front garden, and a few other things besides. Two Ceanothus and two manzanitas and a ninebark and a Catalina ironwood and the flannelbush are the plantings that truly dominate the front yard, the largest of the Agaves mere accents. Yuccas and Nolinas and Dasylirions, native Iris and native grasses, Camassia and Penstemon and a lurking Calochortus or two in spring and that’s nowhere near a complete list. And part of it is that Agaves suit the dryland character of the yard just fine. The garden gets almost no water all summer, and by that I mean that there is a tiny sliver of the yard that gets water sometimes and the rest drinks rain alone.
I wonder lately at a third reason. I realized yesterday that the variegated yellow Agave, the one that’s the size of a 1962 Volkswagen Beetle, is one of my oldest possessions. I brought it home as a pup in the mid-1980s. It lived in pots for ten years or so, and then I planted it in the garden of each house I rented, with an increasing air of finality. “Soon it will be too big to move!” I told myself each time, wishing it well in its final home. This is its third such. We actually own this house, so the finality rings a bit truer.
Becky bought me a new pair of Felco pruners yesterday, and I thought for a moment about how long I’t had been since I’d had a new pair. Nineteen years, I decided. This is my third pair. I still have the other two, and they would be perfectly functional with a bit of cleaning, a new blade and new springs. I will fix them, those old tools: I carried them with me every day for years, one on my hip, the other in the glove compartment in case I hired a friend to work with me for the day. It seemed impossible, knowing me as I do, that I could have kept track of something so eminently losable as a pair of pruners for as long as some of my friends have been alive, and yet there they are.
And I have had the yellow Agave longer than that.
Agaves are semelparous: they flower once and die. Resources are scarce in Agave country, and the plants must build tall towers of bloom to attract pollinating bats. A salmon spends everything it has getting to the headwaters, an Agave commits itself utterly to a future it will not see. This year, or five years from now, I will amble out to get the paper and see a thick stalk, like a giant asparagus spear, emerging from the center of that yellow Agave. A few weeks of wonder as the stalk grow, perhaps as tall as thirty feet, and then my plant will die and Becky will wonder to herself how best to sneak the flower stem into the compost bin without my knowing. It is as inevitable as gravity, a cascade of events set in motion when that old seed from which my plant came first sunk its fingers into moist desert soil. We sit on the edge here tonight. A sharp descent is, perhaps, not far off. Arms are not the worst places to suffer lacerations.
