A Correction

When I wrote about City of Rocks State Park in New Mexico I identified this plant as an agave. It’s not. I had forgotten about seeing these at Big Bend National Park a couple of years ago. This is a sotol. I corrected my blog, but most of you are unlikely to see the corrected version. Being a plant person and someone who likes to have their facts straight, I decided to do a short blog to correct this. There are three groups of desert plants that have a globe of long stiff leaves and an inflorescence on a tall stalk. In general sotol leaves are narrower than the other two. But the easiest way to identify them is that they have a long column of flowers coming directly from the stalk, so when the flowers die you’re left with a dry inflorescence that looks like a bottle brush.

This is an agave. The inflorescence on an agave is branched, so it looks like a tree. This species may be what we call a century plant because it looks like the plant died once it bloomed. The leaves on an agave are also somewhat thicker.

Sometimes very thick.

The third one is this, yucca. The inflorescence can resemble agave, but if you look closely at the base you can see that yuccas grow tall. Their leaves form a globe on the top of the stem which is clad in downturned dead leaves. When they’re young the stem is not noticeable and they can be confused with agaves. But they get quite tall, and then the difference is obvious.

Thank you, I feel better now. (I’ve been waiting to do this until I got decent pictures of each of them. I was hoping to find them all on our tour of Saguaro National Park because they all grow there, but alas, not where we were.)