Century plant does its duty for other plants, then dies

Clay is off today. Here’s a favorite column from May 1, 2008:

So the other day, a lady sent me a picture of a century plant and wanted to know what it was. Well, of course, it was a century plant, a kind of agave. But she apparently didn’t know that, so she asked me. It was a pretty big plant.

She said her father-in-law had told her it was a century plant, and that it only sent up that one big stalk — up to 30 feet, sometimes — once every 100 years.

That’s not quite so. It does send up a pretty tall stalk with flowers, seemingly overnight, but the life span of a century plant is about 25 years, give or take a bit.

After doing its duty for future century plants, it withers and dies.

However, over all those years, the plant has sent out suckers, called adventitious shoots, that will grow into new century plants. So its heritage is continued. When I was in high school, I had this crackpot biology teacher who used to rub his head and mutter, “Reproduce and die. That’s the lesson. Reproduce and die.”

This was not an especially cheerful message for those of us who were certainly interested at that age in trying out that whole reproducing thing, or at least the entertaining parts of it, but who were less than enthusiastic about the dying-afterward part.

But that’s what’s up with the century plant. It puts out its suckers, it shoots up the stalk with its flowers, and then it goes quietly into that long night.