Learning to sculpt beautiful things from base materials is hard. It takes a long time to learn, you play with sharp tools and can easily hurt yourself. Or worse, you might create something really boring and be stuck with it basically forever (you would never throw out your first sculpture, would you?)
Agave salmiana
These photos show off Agave salmiana, probably ‘Green Giant’. It’s green and giant, so why not? This is one of the most sculptural agaves, with recurved green leaves that are green instead of gray.
Like making sculpture, you can hurt yourself with these. To reduce the risk, I cut off the sharp terminal spines on the leaves. The other thing is that the plant is planted well back from the path, although each year it gets closer.
It’s survived some fairly heavy frosts, more than that prickly pear behind it can say (the cactus froze solid one year and has never really recovered). It’s just stuck in some clay soil on a
slight mound, nothing special was done to ensure its longevity. For one thing, it will eventually outgrow the space, and for another it sends out pups – baby plants – readily so there’s always a replacement plant around.
Agave options
There are other agaves that need less space and tolerate frost: Artichoke Agave (A. parryi), Blue Weber Agave (A. tequilana), and the ubiquitous Century Plant (A. americana). Some others, like ‘Sharkskin’ and ‘Blue Glow’ might be worth a try, although they probably tolerate frost less well and would need perfect drainage.
Agave history
Food. Agave leaves are used for pit roasting barbacoa, along with avocado leaves. Not all agaves leaves (nor avocado leaves) are edible, so check your species before doing this. Agave salmiana leaves are supposed to be good for this – one of the reasons we got this plant. You take marinated lamb, wrap it in avocado leaves, layer it in agave (maguey) leaves, cover it and braise slowly. There are lots of recipes online, and you can substitue other things for lamb to create something new and hopefully tasty.
Drink. These plants have been domesticated for thousands of years. A. salmiana’s other name is pulque agave, since when it’s ready you get some excellent pulque out of the plant by fermenting its juice when it’s ready to flower. Other agaves – magueys – are the souce of tequila (if they’re weberi grown in the approved area of Mexico) and mezcal, which allows more species from more regions. You can indeed buy Mezcal made from salmiana agaves – although I haven’t tried it yet.