Agave tequilana

Agave tequilana, or commonly known as blue agave, grows natively in Jalisco, favoring the high altitudes of more than 1,500 m and sandy soil. Commercial and wild agaves have very different life cycles. Both start as a large succulent, with spiky fleshy leaves, which can grow to over two meters in length. Wild agaves sprout a shoot when about five years old, which grows into a stem up to five meters and topped with yellow flowers.

The flowers are pollinated by a native bat (Leptonycteris nivalis) and produce several thousand seeds per plant. The plant then dies. The shoots are removed when about a year old from commercial plants to allow the heart to grow larger. The plants are then reproduced by planting these shoots; this has led to a considerable loss of genetic diversity in cultivated blue agave.

It is rare for one kept as a houseplant to flower; nevertheless, a fifty year old blue agave in Boston has grown a 10 m (30 ft) stalk requiring a hole in the greenhouse roof and flowered sometime during the summer of 2006.

Background
My first vivid memory of the Blue agave, or Agave tequilana, was seeing it by the thousands, cultivated on rolling hillsides surrounding the Hacienda de San Jose del Refugio, in Amatitan, Jalisco, Mexico, not far from Guadlajara. We rode horseback, moving up towards a ridge, and stopped to watch a jimador, ranch worker, shearing off the spiky leaves from a mature Blue agave plant. The core of the agave is harvested as the base ingredient for the distillation of tequila, Mexico’s signature alcoholic drink. Called the pina, it can weigh a hundred pounds or more, and looks much like a giant pineapple.