Century Plant | Agave americana

Botanists realized again last week that "century plant" is a complete misnomer for the American aloe (Agave americana). In Mexico where it is called the maguey it takes only 15 years or so to store up the energy to bloom. Unblooming, it looks like an ordinary ground-palm: a rosette of long, pointed leaves spreading out from a central core. When its time comes it hastily pokes up a huge flowering stalk, thick as a tree trunk, from 15 to 40 ft. high, tops it with a huge cauliflower sprig with hundreds of little white or yellow tubular flowers. After holding this climax for a month, the tall stalk withers, the whole plant dies. Mexicans commonly intercept the climax by cutting out the stalk bud as soon as it shows, hollowing out a basin in the central core. The plant pours its banked energy into the place where the flower-stalk ought to be, produces a basin of sweet sap from which Mexicans make their national drink, syrupy pulque. By distilling fermented pulque they make mescal, a potent liquor. By letting the flower stalk grow, drying and slicing the firm pith, they get natural razor strops, insulating material.

The legend that, north of Mexico, the maguey blossoms only once a century existed largely on lack of observation. The plant blooms naturally in the sunny Southwest. But in northern States the maguey requires the comforts of greenhouses. No northern specimen is known to have bloomed outdoors.

Read more: 1933 Article in Time Magazine

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