Agave or Century Plant Agave

Agaves are beautiful plants; regal, slow growing, and very hard to kill. When an Agave reaches maturity, it will also reward its owner with large numbers of offspring which are easy to pot up and grow on their own. The type pictured here is Agave americana, which is widely kept as a houseplant across the country, and which happily grows to enormous sizes outdoors in hot dry areas. The common name Century Plant is derived from the (incorrect) piece of folk belief that the Agave flowers only once every hundred years.