Century Plant Leaves

Agave palmeri (also known as Palmer's century plant) is an especially large member of the genus Agave, in the family Asparagaceae. It is native to southern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, Sonora and Chihuahua.

Agave palmeri is the largest Agave species growing in the United States. It produces a basal leaf rosette of fleshy, upright green leaves of up to 120 cm (4 ft) in length, with jagged edges and ending in thick spines of 3–6 cm (1.2–2.4 inches) long. Flowers are pale yellow and green and 1.6–2 inches long and grow on branches in the upper third of the flower spike, which can be between up to 5 m (16.5 feet) tall.

Parry’s Agave (Agave parryi)
By Charlie McDonald

You have to be impressed when you see a stand of flowering Parry’s agaves for the first time. Each flowering plant has a giant stalk up to 20 feet tall with 20 to 30 side branches and each side branch with hundreds of flowers. The flowers are reddish in bud and bright yellow when open. Just magnificent!

Beyond sheer beauty, agaves grow in an interesting way. Often called century plants, agaves live many years before flowering, after which they die. Actually, agaves usually live 10 to 30 years before flowering. Most agaves make “pups” or vegetative offshoots that replace the parent plant after it dies.

Agaves have been a source of human food and beverage for at least 9,000 years. When an agave’s central bud is removed, the cavity fills with fluid. This nutritious juice is called aguamiel (honey water in English). When aguamiel is allowed to ferment it becomes an alcoholic beverage called pulque and when pulque is distilled it becomes mescal. Tequila is a high quality mescal produced only from the blue agave plant and grown only in limited regions of Mexico.

Sugars concentrate in the core of an agave just before flowering. If the leaves are trimmed away, the core can be baked or roasted. Native Americans of many Southwestern tribes pit-roasted agaves in an elaborate process that took three or four days of cooking. The sweet meat is said to have a flavor of sweet potato, molasses, and pineapple, but is quite fibrous. Chunks of roasted agave were chewed and the tough fibers discarded. Roasted agave could also be pounded into cakes and dried for later use.

Agave leaves have strong fibers good for many uses. Sisal fiber derived from Agave sisalana is grown worldwide and used for inexpensive twine, rope, paper, fabric, filters, mattresses, and carpets.

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