Sick Of Winter yet? #5

It's time to talk agaves. There were some interesting ones in both our yard and the general neighborhood. Shapes can be spread out or a tight ball of leaves, but agaves are defined by sharply pointed leaf tips. Some  have sharply jagged leaf edges that rip the unwary, others are more well behaved. Colors for leaves mostly are either green, or blue. Flowers appear from a stalk coming up from the plant's center, and can cover a single pole or be on pads that branch out in ascending tiers to the top. Flowering usually marks the death of the plant. With each variety, what you think you know offers exceptions, except for that sharp tip. With all the possible variety, coupled with tolerance for desert conditions, they are a very popular landscaping plant. Other people farm specific ones to produce tequila.

The one I first fell in love with was across the street. It started as a large bunch of pointy green and sharp leaves near their driveway, about 3 feet out in every direction. One day it started sending up a stalk. It grew higher. Then higher. Perhaps ten feet up the stalk started branching, each branch horizontal, growing its own flat pad of blossom buds at the end.

The thing was, every bud was brilliant red!

It was so spectacular, and so rare, we had traffic stopping just to take pictures of it. I actually had to be careful of them when I went across the street to take my own pictures! The effrontery!

As blooming progressed, buds started to open, starting from the bottom branches up to the top by the end of a couple weeks. Red gave way to yellow.

 A careful look to the left side of the blooming stalk may look dusty, but it shows some of the thousands of tiny flying bugs swarming the open petals. I had to enlarge this photo enough that the other side of the picture didn't fit the formatted space and needed to be cropped.

It took about a month for all the excitement to die down. The owners had the whole plant dug out and removed. As far as I could tell, no care was taken to allow seed formation so more of these could be produced. I never saw another like this in the years we were down there.

It is a common flowering form for agaves. Only once did I see one like this that only sent a flowering stalk up about 6 feet.

Note how straight and green the leaves are that this short one springs out of.

Compare that to this one in our yard. Its leaf shape is broader, with totally nasty red curved barbs along the edges and viciously long and sharp  tips on blue leaves. A normally self-respecting person does not get too friendly with this fellow, popular as it is in landscaping for its large size and very blue leaves. Each leaf leaves it's imprint on its neighbor as they grow, separate, and spread out, adding interest to the plants.

When this one decided to send up its stalk, it was very thick and sturdy, and abandoned its blue for a more interesting palette, even as it maintained long sharp defenses. We didn't allow this one to bloom. It turned out it was planted too close to the house and would have run into the roof eaves. Our discovery of what happens then is another story.