Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Agaves are one of the sleeping beauties of nature and they’re a marvel to behold when they bloom. It’s one of the many delights of the western landscape.
The agaves are blooming!
They’re a marvel of nature. These sleeping beauties of sorts grow ever-so-slowly for a decade or two. Then—boom—it’s their time to shine.
A bloom rockets out of the center, growing 4–12 inches a day. It grows impossibly tall—about 20 feet—compared to the plant itself which is only a couple of feet tall.
It’s like a backing singer who suddenly gets their solo and steals the show.
They look like giant asparagus at first. (And they are in the asparagus family—Asparagaceae—so that’s not a shocker.) Then the tubular yellow flowers emerge in Suessian tufts. Pollinators love it. And so do I—they’re simply mesmerizing and gorgeous.
The bloom is its swan song though. Fortunately during its life, it’s sent out little baby agaves all around it called pups to keep the cycle going.
We transplanted a bunch of agave pups from our neighbor’s yard a couple of years ago. About half survived so we’ll have our own amazingly tall agave blooms in 10–30 years.
I have high hopes of setting up a time lapse of the bloom growth once they mature. But obviously that’s a long play. In the meantime, this is a shot I grabbed of a towering Agave parryi bloom at City of Rocks State Park nearish Silver City.
While I do love the colors of the agave and its blooms, I also love monochrome treatments of plants and flowers. It removes the distraction of color to show the texture and structure of them.
I eventually turned this image into photographic art you can find on my art site that’s one of my more popular pieces.
Cheers, friends. Here’s to celebrating the wonderfully weird beauty in nature.
Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Bluesky Art Show
This post is inspired by the Bluesky Art Show, a challenge to share artwork surrounding a weekly theme each Saturday.
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