Agave x victosa ‘Starfish’ is one of our prize agaves, a very rare hybrid between Agave victoriae-reginae and Agave bracteosa, which we planted in 2004. Knowing that it was approaching flowering size, at which point, it would die, and since it has never offset, we chose to drill out the central core, to force it to produce offsets. This works by destroying the flow of auxin hormones, which prevent the dormant leaf buds from growing and producing plants. Two years after the coring, we were rewarded with ten pups. We typically discard the plants after the pups have been removed, but since the remainder of the plant was still green, we decided to watch and see what happened.
To our surprise, it has now begun to produce a flower spike. In theory, since we removed the core (meristem) to promote offsets, there should not have been any tissue remaining to produce a flower spike, so evidently, we took out just enough tissue that it could both offset and flower. This is a wonderful surprise, that will allow us to make crosses with it this year as part of our breeding program. Had it not spiked, it would have likely taken us another 22 years to produce another flower from the removed pups. Exciting times await.
