× Mangave 'Macho Mocha'

From a distance this one looks like one of those prickly desert plants you don't want to bump into. It looks a lot like its relatives in the genus Agave. In fact, the entire plant is pliable and rather rubber-like: even the little points at the tips of the leaves are soft. I've had this plant for three years. It spent the first winter in a cold frame. It spent last winter up against the house wall with a tarp over it at night and on severely cold days. Last winter was hardly a winter at all: some dahlias and potatoes survived even in exposed places.

The plant has grown so much that it will not easily fit into the cold frames. I frankly doubt that it will survive the winter in a pot above ground no matter how well protected. So I'm not sure what to do with it.

I had hoped that it would bloom this year. The inflorescence of this plant is a real production: imagine a purple asparagus about the size of a broom stick. Maybe we'll get to see that next year.

About the name:  ×Mangave is a nothogenus set up to name hybrids between plants nominally assigned to the genera Manfreda and Agave. Manfreda, Agave and Polianthes are so closely related that some species form hybrids readily. I'm of the point of view that if plants are capable of crossing and forming viable progeny, then it makes no sense at all to place them in separate genera - in fact, if the progeny are not only viable but are capable of producing viable offspring themselves, then that suggests that appearances notwithstanding the plants in question are all of one species. To me it makes better sense to consider most so-called intergeneric hybrids not hybrids at all but simply evidence of one morphologically variable species.  So I'm using the name × Mangave only reluctantly.  

Agave the Illustrious

The new Heronswood catalog arrived the other day, and I noticed that they are now offering nicely spotted Agave virginica. I’ve collected this species in a small way for years, always for preference picking out forms with spotted foliage. The plant is also called Manfreda virginica, and it hybridizes readily with Polianthes tuberosa. That they hybridize suggests that the nomenclature needs some adjustment. The three genera Agave, Manfreda and Polianthes evidently are very closely related, so expect some nomenclatural shifting.

We Americans generally pronounce (i.e. mispronounce) this word Agave as ah-GAV-ee or ah-GAHV-ee something like that. Sometimes I hear ah-GAV, too. But those pronunciations don't come close to the original. It’s a classical Greek word which means "noble" or "illustrious" (thank you Liddell and Scott); transliterated it’s agaue or agave. Why the variation between u and v? Whenever there are three vowels in a row, something is likely to give. It’s too hard to articulate three vowels one after another without intervening consonants. In this case, it’s really more a case of one diphthong (the au) followed by a vowel (the u, which it should be pointed out is not the “vowel” we call u in English but rather the sound oo as in moon). What happens in this case? One of the vowels, the “weakest” one, takes on the qualities of a consonant. This typically happens with the vowel i which becomes its consonantal avatar, j, or u which becomes its consonantal avatar v. To understand this, you have to keep in mind that the i, j, u and v sounds in question are not the sounds represented by those symbols in English, but rather the sounds they represent in classical Greek and Latin. The j represents the sound of the y in yellow; the v is the w sound.
Purists will note that the classical Latin alphabet does not have a letter j, nor strictly speaking did it have a letter v for much of its history. Those characters came into use as a shorthand way of indicating that what linguists sometimes call a “glide” occurs where an i or a u is sandwiched between other stronger vowels. Those of you with a love of language should take a look at the previous sentence. It’s a good example of why it’s hard to explain these things in everyday speech. I wrote “where an i or a u is sandwiched”. Should I have written “where an i or an u is sandwiched”? Obviously, when I first wrote it I was thinking in English, and so wrote “a u” rather than “an u”. But after I wrote it I realized that the sounds I was talking about (and this is all about sounds, with the consequences for spelling of secondary importance) are the sounds of Latin. So thinking in Latin this time, and with a tweak to make that clear, the phrase is “ where a Latin i or an u is sandwiched…” That won’t make any sense to you unless you pronounce the u in "an u" as “oo”.

And so how do I pronounce Agave? How about ah-GAH-way?

The image above shows one of the rather ordinary plants now in the garden.