Orca – A Whale of a Tale

Looking good in a JLBG container now is the amazing Agave ovatifolia ‘Orca’. This splendid creamy-edge selection of the whale-tongue century is a plant that probably shouldn’t exist, but the story is almost impossible to believe.

In the early 2000s, a small group of intrepid west coast agave explorers were botanizing in remote regions of Northern Mexico, where Agave ovatifolia grows, when they ran acoss this amazing creamy-edged form in the wild. They returned home with photos, but were quickly persuaded that this gem should be brought into cultivation. In this case, the problem is that this species doesn’t offset, so there was no offsets to rescue. Once it flowers, it was be lost forever.

Before long, the group returned to Mexico, to extract the growing point (meristem), in the hopes that it could be salvaged, and subsequently reproduced via tissue culture. Amazingly, the experiment was successful, and the bud began to grow in the lab. Eventually, a few plants were produced, which were identical to the parent. It was decided to keep the plant rare, by only producing a small quantity to share. Once the lab plantlets had grown to a transplantable size, a plant was taken back to the original site in Mexico, and re-established in the wild. The larger plants were grown on, at California’s Rancho Soledad Wholesale Nursery, where they were sold at $275 each, with only a limited number made available each year.

In 2015, I flew out to California to be “interviewed” at the nursery, to see if I qualified to purchase one, which thankfully, I did. I returned home with my treasure, and we began our drill coring procedure, which resulted in the plants we have to offer today. Although names have been omitted, due to their request, we think this is a great story about how horticulture can find and produce great plant selections, without having a detrimental impact on the natural environment.