Admit it, Agave's got it Going On

The inadvertent chic of Alta California's most fiercely elegant plant

If I were to be reincarnated as a California plant, I’d like to be a Blue Agave. They embody so many of the qualities I seek to emulate:

1. An arresting erectness like a ballet dancer.

2. Resourcefulness. They require little water, yet can generate her own nectar in the form of the most potent alcohol in your wet bar.

3. A lovely chalky color like a Western heroine in matte red lipstick on the side of highway fixing a someone else’s flat tire.

4. A ferocious dignity that can only be described as intimidating. (Blue Agave seems to say “You don’t deserve to touch me… unless you can figure it out.”)

5. A knowing (prehistoric) aura that whispers nonchalantly, Marlboro dangling from her mouth, “I’ve seen it all, darlin.”

6. A Cormac McCarthy-approved approach to parenting, death, and purpose. (If Blue Agave could write, she’d pen something spare and haunting like The Road. See below about monocarpic flowering.)

   Agaves die after flowering, a phenomenon called monocarpic flowering.

   This means the plant dedicates its life force to producing a single, massive flower stalk before it withers and dies. However, the plant's legacy lives on through "pups" or offshoots that form at the base of the parent plant.

Agave Hair Salon

I have always appreciated the way that Blue Agaves are groomed. Trimming them from the bottom gives the refined plant a longer neck. I reflexively find it an aesthetic abomination when someone trims the Agave’s pointy tips off. At Christmas, I savor the SoCal tradition of piercing metal ornaments onto her spears.

A little off the sides please.

Criminal Agave tip trimming (L) ; Agave Holiday Adornment (R)

Prehistoric-looking agaves at Rancho San Julian

I will leave you with two agaves, pictured below, on Padre Street in downtown Santa Barbara. They aren’t Blue Agaves, but I admire the exuberance of their last hurrah. They seem to be saying something joyous in their flowering. Women do this too when we give birth : we scream with pain and relief and ecstasy. The austerity of the Agave — never surviving the launch of their progeny — somehow feels in keeping with this plant’s dramatic and savage beauty.

Agaves giving their final song.

Today’s feature from the Studio Shop

I wrote this prose piece in 2020. Collage of vintage photograph of the my mother in Spain c. 1967 accompanied by an imagined hand-lettered note from mother to daughter. Size is 12 x 18" . Small batch printing on fine heavyweight matte paper in Santa Barbara, CA.

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