Mojave Gardener

Strongly structural, blue-gray, and not too big; consider adding Agave murpheyi just about anywhere in your garden

I grow over a dozen agaves. I took to them immediately when I started gardening in the low desert. I can’t say there haven’t been casualties. I find agaves persnickety among succulent plants. Many like the dry heat, but our harsh, unrelenting sun can be hard on them. I’ve over- and under-watered them. I’ve given them too much sun and too much shade. But there is one exceptional agave, Agave murpheyi, that has forgiven me the long line of calamities I’ve forced on its peers. 

Murphy agaves are easy going in the garden

Murphy agaves seem to take whatever I throw at them: the hot, reflected heat of the front garden gravel bed, the extra water on the slope in the back garden just above the retaining wall, the partial shade along the stuccoed cement block wall on the west side of the house. They grow with hardly any care, unfazed by these different habitats. 

But it is their form that brings me back constantly to their presence. 

Unlike many large agaves that get wide as they age, their old leaves growing out and against the earth, Murphy agaves instead grow firmly upright, taller than they are wide, forming elegant, splash-less fountains. They remind me of ornamental grasses and while they move not at all in a gentle wind or raging gale, as grasses do, they give the impression of water coming up from the deep reaches of my sandy, alkaline soil, like I have stumbled on a forgotten oasis.

The agave genus is huge, and Murphy agaves are just one of many choices

There are hundreds of agave species. And for your money and education, you can’t beat Mary and Gary Irish’s reference book, Agaves, Yuccas, and Related Plants, on the Agavaceae family, which includes descriptions and cultivation information for agaves, yuccas, hesperaloes, and several similar genus. 

Agaves are sometimes commonly called century plants. Though the moniker is mostly applied to Agave americana, I learned to call cold-hardy agaves, from the high deserts of Utah, century plants. But only a handful, if any, are so long lived and thus deserving of the moniker. Murphy agaves lives are on the much shorter end of the spectrum. 

Almost all agaves are monocarpic, though there are exceptions. Agave bracteosa, a small, gentle, bright green agave, is polycarpic, meaning it flowers many times. Monocarpic agaves flower only once, at the end of their long or short lives, a single exhalation into and out of floral sensuality. Until their coup de grace, they lie in wait, growing big or small, storing up energy until their final, fatal blooms exhaust them and they go, raging, not at all quiet and gentle, into the undying light of summer sun. 

This fact discourages many gardeners from planting them. The thinking? All that work caring for a plant that, when it finally blooms, dies. 

But the agave reminds us of temporality, that gardening exists in time, that floral intelligence occurs at the level of the species, and that the individual is part of a great and grand whole that precedes us and continues long after us. 

Agaves offer the gardener a little of Heraclitus’s unity of opposites. They suffer abundance and scarcity, suggest movement and stillness, offer softness and hardness. But Murphy agaves are not actually soft to the touch and being stuck by a terminal end is painful. 

I was stabbed in a knuckle once and a hard, round ball formed between bone and skin. It eventually healed, but for a while it was a silent token, a generous reminder of life outside of the hard lines of my middle-aged body. Of the fact that life welcomes itself always, even unbidden, into the gardener’s corpus.

Designing with Murphy agaves

Murphy agaves look especially good on gentle slopes, planted in groups, with native wildflowers growing near and through them. It is spectacular among actual grasses, the Muhlenbergia genus for example. The contrast is so arresting that I sometimes lose myself and time, staring into the composition. The combined movements of such still creatures makes me understand how in some worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin’s making, the plants actually move, inching their way across the ground in plainly visible ways. 

Murphy agaves inch much slower. But they migrate nonetheless. They are prodigious producers of pups. Little clones, connected by long, thick, white, scaled and fleshy roots, extend underneath the soil from the primary plant, seeking out hospitable places to sprout and grow. 

These offsets emerge from the soil like the beak of a desert tortoise, tunneling their way achingly and slowly from the deep, desert earth. The bluish green beak opens and from it emerges slowly and certainly larger leaves that inch up and then out until one day the little pup grows its own roots and breaks free of parent to start out on its own. 

Propagating Murphy agaves is very easy

Murphy agaves happily propagate this way and both and old and young specimens engage in this behavior, creating miniature agave bosques when the conditions are right. You may leave your agaves to grow like that, or you can dig them up, severing the arterial life support when the time is right and letting them root elsewhere. They are the same plant, identical in genetic material, but singular, now bereft of a parent’s care.

When it finally flowers, it will produce bulbils rather than seeds. The bulbils look like, and are, tiny agave plants that grow along the flowering branches. Even if your Murphy agave does not produce offsets, after flowering you will have dozens of small little plants to pot up or to give away.

Caring for Murphy agaves in the garden

For such an easy plant to grow, Murphy agaves can be difficult to find in southern Nevada nurseries. But they are common in smaller, backyard nurseries, as they are so easy to propagate. My own collection started from three overgrown container specimens that I found at a roadside nursery off of Boulder Highway outside of Las Vegas. I have divided them and planted the offsets wherever a strong, consistent, and architectural shape is needed. 

When planting, dig a wide, shallow hole with a little bump in the middle. Place the crown of the plant on this bump, and fan the roots out. Backfill with brutal native soil and artfully place rocks and stones to hold the plant in place while it takes root. The rocks will maintain moisture and provide shade, keeping the earth a little cooler. 

The planting advice at this point comes down to your gut. Water right away. Or wait for a week. Murphy agaves will live for quite awhile uprooted, placed haphazardly on the shady side of your garden shed. Immediate water is hardly essential, and you risk killing them with too much water. 

Murphy agaves are native to the Sonoran desert, which tells you they appreciate summer water; they have grown accustomed to monsoons. When planted at the bottom of a gentle decline, they will catch runoff and flourish. 

Water on occasion their first year in the ground, then sparingly. As with all desert plants, if your drainage is good you can get away with extra water and the plant will grow quickly.