Agaveville

In 2016 three of my Agave ovatifolia bloomed.
They received pollen from - and donated pollen to - Plant Delights Nursery.
Three seedling batches of the hybrids that resulted have just been released by PDN.
1) Agave ovatifolia x flexispina aka 'Blue Rapture';
2) Agave [(lophantha x pseudosalmiana) x ovatifolia] aka 'Twisted Tongue';
3) Agave victoriae-reginae x ovatifolia aka 'Queens Whalecome'

have a look if you wish

https://www.plantdelights.com/collectio ... ue-rapture" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.plantdelights.com/collectio ... ted-tongue" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

https://www.plantdelights.com/collectio ... -whalecome" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Cheers,

Mike

Very cool! They are beautiful. You must be a proud parent!

Mike-
Those look great and pretty cool you were part of that.

Very cool...I have a soft spot for victoriae-reginae hybrids, but the price is gonna keep me away from that one

Melt in the Sun wrote:Very cool...I have a soft spot for victoriae-reginae hybrids, but the price is gonna keep me away from that one

I was also tempted, but hard to make out from the pictures exactly how much they lean one way or the other. Maybe if they add better pictures of that one, but I struggled mightily and eventually spent the $$$ on some others they had on offer. Still tempted though.

"Whalecome"? Serious???

Melt in the Sun wrote:Very cool...I have a soft spot for victoriae-reginae hybrids, but the price is gonna keep me away from that one

Ditto... on the cool and ditto regarding the price.... seems excessive for a plant in a 3.5" pot.

Gee.S wrote:"Whalecome"? Serious???

I wasn't going to say it, but yeah ...

Hey, it's not a bad name...fits the plants, even if it sounds a little bit redneck. I bet they lose some of those marginal spines as they grow; many other v-r hybrids do.

'Twisted Tongue' from here looks exactly like the salmiana x lophantha to me; I don't see ovatifolia there at all. They give a different parentage on the PDN page too, which is strange. From MJP's description, the S x L was the seed parent - I wonder if it selfed.

Melt in the Sun wrote:Hey, it's not a bad name...fits the plants, even if it sounds a little bit redneck. I bet they lose some of those marginal spines as they grow; many other v-r hybrids do.

'Twisted Tongue' from here looks exactly like the salmiana x lophantha to me; I don't see ovatifolia there at all. They give a different parentage on the PDN page too, which is strange. From MJP's description, the S x L was the seed parent - I wonder if it selfed.

I did pick up their "parryantha" hybrid. Too small to tell just yet, but the habitat photo looked cool. Curious how these will turn out when they get larger.

Yes - it has been a privilege to participate in producing new hybrid agaves. Serendipity can be a marvelous thing.

I only named 'Blue Rapture'.

The other names were given by Tony Avent (one suspects perhaps for just stirring things up, as it were. No publicity is bad publicity et cetera).

As for the parentage of 'Twisted Tongue' - it is deep. And yes, there is ovatifolia in the cross. It would be difficult for anyone to make that judgement if they had not seen the opposite cross (ovatifolia as pod parent), of which there were only a few viable seeds and thus very few seedlings - not enough to make available for sale. If you put the two seed groups together, you would have a very difficult time (nigh impossible I think) sorting them out again. Not your fault for not having the opportunity to see this. In both groups it is hard to discern the ovatifolia parentage, even when ovatifolia was the pod parent.

Agave 'Twisted Tongue's pod parent was already a hybrid with complex heritage. Agave lophantha was one parent. The other parent was a plant know as Agave salmiana 'Logan Calhoun'. We (Tony Avent, Zac Hill, and I) have come to realize that the green agaves from the northern Sierra Madre and southern Texas are not in fact Agave salmiana, but are instead of complex origin themselves. Based on floral characters analyzed by Zac Hill, inflorescence characters, leaf color, presence or absence of asperris leaf surface, and surculose traits, we concluded that three "species" appear to have contributed to the genome of the plants we have known as Agave salmiana 'Bellville'; 'Green Goblet'; and 'Logan Calhoun'. The three species being Agave americana; Agave gentryi; and Agave asperrrima.

On a side note. It appears that specimens of Agave gentryi display a range of characters (floral and leaf and surculose traits) that fall in between Agave montana and Agave asperrima. I am not saying Agave gentryi is a hybrid, but that its origins may lay in introgression between the highland species Agave montana and the lowland species Agave asperrima, with Agave gentryi occupying the intermediate elevations. Once Agave gentryi established itself as a species, it was able to share its genetics (possible ably assisted by Leptonycteris curasoe) with the Agave americana assemblage, thus producing the Agave pseudosalmia group we know as 'Bellville'; 'GreenGoblet'; and 'Logan Calhoun'. Anyway, that is why Tony Avent can rightly claim the complex lineage of Agave 'Twisted Tongue'.

Sorry for being rather pedantic. I rarely get to share my thoughts on these subjects.

A photo of my Agave ovatifolia in bloom in 2016.

Thanks for clarifying! I have one of these 'Logan Calhoun' x lophantha plants (now named 'Stairway to Heaven'), and the offsets I pull every year look rather similar to those seedlings - hence my question.

Great picture - for such a large plant I always expect the spike to be larger than it is. Did you get much seed from the other crosses on your ovatifolias?

A photo of my Agave pseudosalmiana 'Saltillo' growing its bloom stalk.
Notice that the bracts are red and slightly overlapping - traits of Agave gentryi. However its flowers had traits of Agave asperrima (cuculate and papillose tepals). The flower stalk was straight as in Agave americana (not bent between branches as in A. asperrima), and the leaves conformed with Agave americana ssp. protamerica - except in color perhaps, being more like Agave asperrima ssp. madrensis.

And Agave pseudosalmiana "Saltillo' in flower (background)
with an Agave ovatifolia in bloom (foreground).

Melt in the Sun wrote:Thanks for clarifying! I have one of these 'Logan Calhoun' x lophantha plants (now named 'Stairway to Heaven'), and the offsets I pull every year look rather similar to those seedlings - hence my question.

Great picture - for such a large plant I always expect the spike to be larger than it is. Did you get much seed from the other crosses on your ovatifolias?

The seed production varied greatly.

I had good seed set of ovatifolia x 'Hacksaw' - but few were viable (black, but very thin seeds).
I also had good seed set of ovatifola x flexispina, and these germinated well.
Other ovatifolia-x crosses had very little seed set.

Agave pseudosalmiana 'Saltillo' had a bloom time that overlapped with Agave ovatifolia, and the honey bees were there in hordes (swarms). This was sufficient to cross-pollinate the two, as 'Saltillo' set seeds well beyond my ability to reach. PDN had a lot of this seed, but the seedlings seem to have been distributed to employees and volunteers, and not offered for sale (not yet anyway).

It is interesting, when there is little seed set in a hybrid cross, what few seeds produced often will be very near the tip of the capsules. Obviously these should be saved despite being small and few in number.

I should note, PDN received all the seeds from my ovatifolia hybrid attempts, as PDN provided the pollen. I kept a few seeds of my 'Saltillo' x ovatifolia cross, but have none now to share. Sorry.

And "No" I do not make money from this project. I see it as an opportunity to contribute to the development of horticulture's new horizons, and am grateful for the opportunity to do so.

Wow great looking agaves for sure. What does your soil consist of for the garden they grow in. Not sure how much rain fall more or less you get compared to us.

Bananaguy wrote:Wow great looking agaves for sure. What does your soil consist of for the garden they grow in. Not sure how much rain fall more or less you get compared to us.

The beds you see in the photos were composed of: 78m gravel; sifted leaf-mold compost (form the city of Sanford) at just about a 1:1 ratio.

Over the years the compost decomposes, and whenever a plant is replaced, I take the opportunity to mix in Black Kow compost mixed with paver sand.

The top-dressing / mulch is the 78m gravel from a local granite quarry. Any 78m gravel would do (granite; or slate; or limestone... what have you).

In 2008 the 78m gravel was $38 a ton. Cheap, even after hiring a dump truck to deliver it. (I also hired him to move most of it around for me).

Congratulations on contributing to a cool project.

Okay thanks for the info.

MJP wrote: Sorry for being rather pedantic. I rarely get to share my thoughts on these subjects.

Why pedantic, your informations are really interesting.

MJP wrote: I see it as an opportunity to contribute to the development of horticulture's new horizons, and am grateful for the opportunity to do so.

These are the first ovatifolia hybrids to my knowledge and it is a species with great qualities for gardeners.
I'm just wondering if the parentage of all these horticultural hybrids ( Those you are talking about and all others) will be yet clearly understood and known after one , two or three decades.

Luc wrote:

MJP wrote: Sorry for being rather pedantic. I rarely get to share my thoughts on these subjects.

Why pedantic, your informations are really interesting.

MJP wrote: I see it as an opportunity to contribute to the development of horticulture's new horizons, and am grateful for the opportunity to do so.

These are the first ovatifolia hybrids to my knowledge and it is a species with great qualities for gardeners.
I'm just wondering if the parentage of all these horticultural hybrids ( Those you are talking about and all others) will be yet clearly understood and known after one , two or three decades.

Thanks for the kind words, Luc.

I have compiled a table that compares the morophological traits and habitat occurrences of Agave montana, Agave gentryi, and Agave asperrima. I can reproduce it here if that would help visualize the relationship of the three species.

As for Agave pseudosalmiana, I have not compiled a table comparing species traits. It is clear that Agaves 'Bellville; 'Green Goblet'; 'Logan Calhoun'; and 'Saltillo' are closely related to one another, and form an assemblage that is coherent in their morphologies of leaf; flower; surculose tendencies; and that is wholly transmitted to their offspring (the offspring look like their parents, not like an odd assortment one would get from a recent hybrid). The flowers differ from those of the Group Salmianae, and all of the similar looking true Agave salmiana are from much further south (San Luis Potosi, for instance) and are much more frost tender, and have leaves that are not so shiny green. Thus the shiny green agaves from the north need a different name to separate them in conversation from the true Salmianae, so I call them Agave pseudosalmianae - the false salmiana. It is not an official designation. It is just somewhere to start.

It is perhaps a vexed question to ask "What is enough evidence to say that these agaves are a different species?" because, as Gentry stated, the Agave tend to change by degrees from one to the other. This is a consequence of their multi annual mode of reproduction which allows developing species to interbreed whenever the opportunity to do so arises. This may be an excellent adaptation of the genus to adapt to a varied environment that is in constant change (temporally speaking). Couple that with human intervention over the centuries to hybridize the plants for better production of food, beverage, and fiber, and you have a rather confusing genetic spectrum to deal with. I think that with the agave it helps to gather information, then stand back and take a look at it from a distance. Then a pattern may be seen that informs the eye - and mind. Well, that's how I approach these fascinating and wonderful plants.

Cheers to you, Luc.

Mike

Take care nevertheless with the use of composed words like 'pseudosalmiana', it explains well your thought but I know that some people take it as face value. I think that the scientific way to say : "I think this is this species, but I am not sure" is : Genus aff. (for affinis) species.

Now, in view of the photo you posted earlier with the Agave 'Saltillo' in bloom, it seems that salmiana can be kicked out the game. 'Bellville', 'Logan Calhoun' and 'Green Goblet' also if we follow yours earlier statements ( which I pretty agree with ) have you ever seen these last three in bloom and if yes, do they match with the inflorescence of your 'Saltillo' ?

All of this reminds me an old thread, see here : viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7184&p=32530#p32530" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Luc wrote:Take care nevertheless with the use of composed words like 'pseudosalmiana', it explains well your thought but I know that some people take it as face value. I think that the scientific way to say : "I think this is this species, but I am not sure" is : Genus aff. (for affinis) species.

Now, in view of the photo you posted earlier with the Agave 'Saltillo' in bloom, it seems that salmiana can be kicked out the game. 'Bellville', 'Logan Calhoun' and 'Green Goblet' also if we follow yours earlier statements ( which I pretty agree with ) have you ever seen these last three in bloom and if yes, do they match with the inflorescence of your 'Saltillo' ?

All of this reminds me an old thread, see here : viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7184&p=32530#p32530" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I have seen them all in bloom over the years. The inflorescence is similar - except that the bracts of 'Saltillo' were red.

Zac Hill is a brilliant fellow and of the opinion that these green agaves are a subset of Agave americana ssp. protamerica. However, I have never seen red bracts on an inflorescence of any Agave americana of any subspecies or varieties, and so consider the red bracts of 'Saltillo' as telltale evidence of the influence of Agave gentryi in their heritage (green leaves; increased hardiness over any Agave americana of any subspecies or variety). Also, none of the seedlings of these green agaves has been blue (and I have seen hundreds of them) - to me evidence that they are a stable entity. None of the seedlings have asperris leaves. I think they deserve consideration as an assemblage, recognized perhaps as - and tell me if I am stating this correctly - Agave aff. pseudosalmiana and subject to further study.

A few photos taken at JC Raulston Arboretum, Raleigh, NC over the years.