Agave parryi (I think)

It’s that time of year when the family collects agave sightings around our Albuquerque neighborhood, detouring our drives and walks and bike rides to follow their progress, sharing locations and pictures whenever we’re out and about.

This one greeted me this morning as I was returning from my first tentative bike ride in a week (bad case of the crud). I looped around when I saw it, up on the sidewalk to better catch the morning sun, talked to one of the neighborhood walkers who said she’d been watching its florescence on her ambles, texted the results to L.

I’m not an expert (help out in the comments if you’ve got the knowledge), but I’m pretty sure this one is Agave parryi, commonly known as Parry’s Agave, which is common in Albuquerque gardens. The parryi variant, native from Arizona to west Texas, and south into Chihuahua and Sonora, is one of several hundred agaves – maybe 340? – that started their journey in the semi-arid Americas.

Along the way, we humans gave them a lot of help. Or perhaps they helped us?

Their domestication – because of their yummy hearts, kinda like artichokes once cooked down to a more digestible carbohydrate – goes back thousands of years in the Americas, probably pre-dating corn/maize. Some genetic variants seem to clump around the sites of settlements, suggesting people not only cultivated them but took them with them as they moved across the landscape. They’re extremely drought tolerant, which makes them a good food stuff in this arid climate. They famously (Agave tequilana) serve as a beverage base, and the fibers of their leaves can be woven into fabrics.

Fun agave fact: back a few million years, agaves share a common ancestor with asparagus.

We don’t eat or drink or wear them in my suburban Albuquerque neighborhood, at least that I know of, but maybe we could?

Parry’s is only one of the agaves found in the city’s suburban gardens. We’ve got a a couple variants of what I think are Agave americana in our yard. I’m a little confused about the native range of americana, but the book Agaves of Continental North America has them native mostly to Mexico with a few bits and bobs in south Texas and Arizona. One of our americanas, which we bought at a Tucson nursery, seems to struggle with the cold extremes of our winters, but it’s hanging on. The other is a monster of a “century plant” version we got from a friend, massive with frightening pokey bits at the end of its leaves, which when curled just so can catch the rain or the water when I give it the occasional shot from the hose.

There’s a sadness to the dramatic show the Parryis are putting on right now. They plants live 20-ish years plus or minus, and then go out in this blaze of glory, one dramatic push toward reproduction to spread seeds before they die.

But they often will send out “pups,” which with a bit of nurturing will carry on the lineage once the parent plant is gone.