One of our more interesting new century plants is Agave ovatifolia ‘Glowing Angel’. This exceptional plant originated here, as a sport from Agave ‘Awakening Angel’, but without the blue edge. In winter, the foliage turns blue, but in early spring, the plant glows, with the intensity of the color radiating out from the center, which
One of the joys of growing plants from seed is to study the amazing variability within seedlings. Below is one of our outstanding Agave ovatifolia seedling selections from 2014. This form is very compact and dense, with wonderfully pleated foliage. Since this species never offsets, it will flower and die, unless we destroy the central
Jabba the Century Plant Read More »
Several years ago, plantsman Hans Hansen shared an Agave ovatifolia mutation he’d found. This unusual sport shared a trait of many hosta, viridescence. This occurs in both gold and variegated hostas which are brighter in spring, but age to green. Such is the case with Agave ovatifolia ‘Awakening Angel’. We had a theory that this
While we leave all the fancy mangave creations to our friend Hans Hansen at Walters Gardens, we continue our work on creating more winter hardy (to 0 degrees F) hybrids. Over the last couple of years, we’ve made several crosses using some of Hans’ hardiest Agave ovatifolia based F1 generation selections, like xMangave ‘Blue Mammoth’
Our 2016 century plant hybrid is looking quite lovely in the garden this month. This plant, which we named Agave x victorifolia ‘Prince of Whales’, is a hybrid of the Whale’s tongue century plant, Agave ovatifolia (male parent), and the Queen Victoria century plant, Agave victoriae-reginae (female parent). Since both parents are non-offsetting, this means
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If you’re able to visit during this years spring open house, it will be hard to miss the look of love in the air. We have a record 20 century plants in spike in the garden…a number far surpassing any flowering record we’ve set previously. Agaves are a genus of mostly monocarpic plants…they live their
Since we are limited in the number of hardy century plant species, our only option for more agave diversity in the garden is to create it by crossing existing hardy species together. Here are a few of our recent successes. Agave x amourifolia is a Plant Delights/JLBG creation from a cross we made in 2016
Sex for the Centuries Read More »
As a plant breeder, one of the cool things we get to do is observe the diversity that arises from a single cross. In some cases, the diversity shows up in the first generation (F1), while in other cases, the first set of offspring need to have sex with each other for the diversity in
This summer, two of our spiking clumps of Agave ovatifolia became dislodged from the ground during a violent thunderstorm. We wondered if they would still set viable seed despite being without roots, since the energy built up from 15 years of growth was still in the foliage. We made several crosses without having to set
I’ve fallen and I can’t get up Read More »
The bees are buzzing with excitement over the impending flowering of five clones of Agave ovatifolia here at JLBG. We’ve never had a year with quite this many whale’s tongue agaves spiking at once, so it should be quite a show. Here’s our Agave ovatifolia ‘Frosty Blue’, which was the first to spike, but the
