A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
agave
A rosette plant of thick, fibrous, spine-tipped leaves that spends years — sometimes decades — packing sugar into a central core, then spends all of it at once on a flowering stalk that can rise twenty feet or more, sets seed, and dies. There are roughly two hundred species, nearly all of them American and most of them Mexican. The plant is food, fence, fiber, needle, thread, soap, paper, and drink.
Etymology
Latin agave, from Greek agauē, feminine of agauos, “noble, illustrious.” Linnaeus applied it in Hortus Upsaliensis and he explained himself in a footnote: A new class needed a new name, nothing among the existing synonyms was worthy, an ancient plant merited an ancient name, and so he called it agave because it is an admirable plant.
Notes
A century plant does not take a century. Most flower somewhere between eight and thirty years. The stalk is a quiote in Mexico and is eaten roasted; leaf fiber is sisal and henequen; the sap fermented is pulque. Agaves are pollinated in part by nectar-feeding bats, which is why so many species open at night.