I’m a lover of aloes. Everytime I think I have completed my collection, I find another one. When I first started collecting, it took me awhile to realize that I was mistaking agaves for aloes so I had to get that figured out. It seems so obvious to me now, but I had to learn a few tricks to tell the difference.
Aloes and agaves are both beautiful but they are very different plants. It helps to know the difference between these two kinds of succulents when you are planting because the way they live and grow can impact your garden down the line in some very dramatic ways.
Agaves have a tendency to live for many years in a garden, they only bloom once, then they die. In their last hurrah, agaves send up a tall stalk that flowers for months, and then the plant quickly dies after that, leaving you with a big empty spot where your beautiful agave had been growing. In most species, when the stalk finishes blooming, the flowers turn into mini agaves that pop off and propagate themselves if left lying around on the ground. A friend gave me a blue agave bloom stalk last fall that ended up giving me tons of baby blue agaves that I have since potted and given away.
Aloes can bloom yearly but that doesn’t mark the end of their lifecycle. They tend to propagate by pupping off little aloes around the base of the mother plant. Within a few years you can fill in your garden with new plants you started yourself. I’ve got petite, little aloes and large, elegant aloes. Most of the aloes I’ve seen bloom an orange color, but I have one variety that blooms a beautiful muted yellow. In the middle of winter, when most plants are resting, aloes are blooming all over the place in Southern California. I think we tend to take it for granted because we live here, but people visiting here are always fascinated by the displays along the highways.
Another way to tell agaves and aloes apart is by the spines on the leaves. Not all agaves or aloes have spines, but if they do, agaves tend to have sharper spines and they are tougher skinned than aloes. Agaves only have spines on the edges of their leaves, but aloes can have spines all over their leaves. If all else fails, and you are trying to tell the difference, aloes have a gel-like substance in their leaves that you can find by sticking a thumbnail into a leaf. Agaves are fibrous and won’t have the gooey stuff like an aloe.
When I was in sixth grade and we studied about Mexico, I remember learning about agave plants and that they could be used for sewing because of the heavy pointed spine at the end of the leaf and the fact that it was attached to fibrous threads down the leaves. And let’s not forget to mention that tequila is made from the agave, specifically, Agave tequilana, or as it’s commonly known – surprise! – the Blue Agave! Shoot, I gave all those plants away……….
A great book about succulents is called Designing with Succulents by Deborah Lee Baldwin.
Tagged as:
agaves,
aloes,
succulents
