Agave Striata Gallery.

I claim no credit for getting this plant as far as it has. A friend of mine was moving house in December and had nowhere to keep it. It had spent a few winters outside so I was hopeful that it might survive another just covered with fleece and tucked up close to a south facing wall. As it turned out we had a couple of nights down to -6C and about 10 days where the temperatures struggled to get above freezing. Fortunately we had no snow because snow on top the fleece covering an agave never ends well. I uncovered it about April time and it seemed to have made it through the cold snap. I left it to go about its business until I noticed the flower spike emerging in late May.

The original label still in the pot had it down as stricta but the more the flowers developed the more I begun to doubt if it was really was stricta.

More on this later.......

26th May 2023

29th May 2023

3rd June 2023

3rd July 2023

6th July 2023

6th July 2023

9th August 2023

Ideograph from Gentry's book.

Despite wrestling with leaf morphology and flower coloring, there was nothing conclusive that narrows down the identification better than stricta or striata. Looking at Gentry's ideograph, the tube length compared to the tepal length for striata is about a 3:1 ratio.

Gentry states "Agave stricta is separable from A. striata by its short flower tube, equaled or exceeded by the tepals in length". This is not what we have here.

So based on these findings, I'm calling it striata.

Our Ideograph from flower measurements.