Swanning around
Frank realises a long-abandoned ambition to possess a slender, swan-necked temptress
The generosity of a friend and neighbour in California provides Frank with the opportunity to fall in love all over again with a slender temptress
SWORDS FRANK RONAN ucculent but slender might describe a state we can only dream of, which alone is a reason to admire the attenuated agave. I first saw it at Kew or, at least, saw it for the first time with a decent camera to hand there which, by recording the thrill, made it the most potent memory, possibly obliterating earlier, unrecorded sightings. Images have a bizarre knack of becoming truths above other truths.
Five, possibly successive, years followed when it was acquired and lost to the English winter. It wouldn’t suffer to live in either the house or the greenhouse. Other agaves shrivelled a little and waited for spring, but the slender one, with operatic pathos and in spite of all extolments of her tiny hand, would sicken and die before my eyes, not meant for that world.
It was the main thing that made me envious, on my first trip to LA, that entire beds could be filled with nothing but Agave attenuata. It grew in ditches by the roadside and on sand dunes by the sea. It existed, albeit meanly, on the premises of people who had managed to kill all other living things (not counting themselves, but perhaps they didn’t qualify). I came away adding it to a list of the great injustices of life and determined that I would never torture myself by trying to grow it again.
Perhaps that is why I didn’t rush to plant any when we arrived to live here. And then when something is so common that you see it in quantity driving down any street you soon cease to think of it as desirable. I was a little bowled over, the first winter, on seeing them flower: giant croziers towering overhead, and thought that perhaps we might get a few. Our friend Helena offered cuttings of hers and we said yes of course we’d love to and almost certainly would someday. But it was not a day that year. ILLUSTRATION CELIA HART
For those to whom the name conjures no image, or for those who are so used to seeing it that they see nothing, I should point out that Agave attenuata is a plant like no other; certainly like no other agave. The leaves, which are a pale and slightly glaucous green, peel back from a perfect and slender cone, on which the next leaf makes an elegant diagonal. Everything about it is smooth and clean and proper. Eventually the rosette will reach four feet or so across on a trunk of about the same length, which can be louchely recumbent. At that point it will give all to throw up a spike of white flowers with a curvature that swan’s imitate for courtship display (more improbable to think it was the other way round). There was a difficult triangle of ground by a new path that needed a quick fix, and we finally took the truck to Carpinteria to see what Helena was offering. We knew her garden and her abundant attenuatas already, and on the way there I was trying to work out from where we could most tactfully extract a few heads without leaving scars in the landscape. With insane generosity she pointed at all the biggest and declared that they were the ones she wanted rid of. In twenty minutes the bed of the truck was crammed, and five later the back seat filled.
You can look down your nose at instant gardening, and I do, but filling an entire bed with mature plants in half an afternoon is the kind of kick you don’t mind having once in a while. They suffered a little from sunburn, as they had come from slightly more shade than they have now, but so far, so good, and I find myself in possession of a thing I once dreamt of and gave up as unobtainable. Better yet was the discovery that there is a very nice blue form, and a delectable variegated one. It would be tragic to resist having them all.
is a novelist who gardens in both the UK and USA.