Aloe

There will be, no matter what time of the year, an aloe species flowering, but it’s fair to say that the best or rather the most widespread flowering is now, winter. My favourite aloe, Aloe bainesii is busy doing its thing now. We’ve made quite a feature of this aloe at the BBG. It’s not the showiest aloe flower, a soft reddish pink but, being the largest aloe, a tree to perhaps 10 metres, it’s still quite a sight. Check them out on Mill Hill; also one on the lawn by the conservatories.

Agave

In particular a patch of agaves on the right just before the road turn-off to the old house. (Here’s a thought: the roads at the BBG need names, and to be signposted.) This was a planting I did when it was possible for us keen BBG supporters to physically help and do things. It was after the
time of the parks department empire-building, when we were discouraged from doing anything, but before the current time of Health & Safety, when it’s assumed we’re all incapable idiots. Don Stevenson, then curator, was a fan of large garden beds, so I did one with some Araucaria columnaris and these agaves. Peter Cave grew the araucarias and I propagated the agaves from two plants we had here at Paloma. One had flowered and these were bulblets. When they flower some agaves, as well as seed pods, or instead of, produce bulblets, similar to furcraeas.

This agave has an interesting history here in New Zealand. Firstly, we’re not sure if it’s been properly identified. I call it Agave atrovirens but, to be frank, it’s a guess. It was introduced to NZ in the late 1980s by an Auckland friend, Michael Poulgrain. He’s a great plantsman and did many plant-collecting trips overseas. He became concerned at the treatment, or lack thereof, of the locals in some of these very poor areas and he went and stayed and worked in some of these far-flung places, a bit like VSA. On one of these trips in Mexico, he was up a hill, throwing rocks in an attempt to knock seed pods off this massive agave. After a while he became aware he was causing the need for locals, downhill from him, to evacuate. The hillside was sparsely covered in oak and pine scrub obscuring his activities and when he departed he felt he was regarded as a lunatic. I well remember coming back from an Auckland plant trip with two little seedlings from that hillside in Mexico. It’s a big, beautiful agave and the area needs a bit of a tidy-up, easier said than done, but worth the effort!