Abbotsley Garden’s Flower Spike

Is it a Yukka? Is it an Agave? We haven’t really worked that out yet, but we’re now leaning towards is it being a Furcraea bedinghausii. What we do know is that this unusual plant has suddenly grown an enormous flower spike over the past few weeks!

​When we bought Abbotsley in October 2010, we saw there was a reasonably large and quite attractive sculptural plant, just above the rock wall by the pool and thought no more about it. Over the years, it grew taller and wider but largely retained its original shape so that by six years later it was about twice the size.

2010

2016

Over the past couple of years, we noticed it had started to grow much taller, developing something of a two-metre-high trunk and then, all of a sudden, up shot a massive flower spike, towering above the pool and everything else around it!

​The plant is now over 7m high with a 5m high flower spike! This all happened through September and October this year – 14 years after we were first introduced to Abbotsley’s garden.

So just what it this amazing plant? We took some photos of it, including close-ups of the flowers and leaves, and set to work with Google Lens. What we found was inconclusive, but it seems most likely that it’s a Furcraea bedinghausii. Apparently, closely related to Agaves, Furcraea bedinghausii is a plant that is native to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. It seems that it’s mainly grown for the foliage, which is upright at the top and as you move further down the plant, it points downwards. These grey green leaves form a rosette and are up to 1 metre in length.

What make this such a spectacular plant of course is the flower spike which can reach over 4 metres in height (ours is clearly one of the tallest!) It’s renowned for having masses of creamy-to-green-white flowers on stems radiating from the central stem which then droop down to form a large umbrella of flowers.

We also read that, after flowering, the plant dies, but will have formed a number of bulbils that will ensure the plant regenerates, so it’s going to be interesting to see what happens over the next few weeks.

​And the intrigue doesn’t stop there. Some years ago, we were gifted Roos Marsden’s Garden Project Book which he used to plan the garden after building the house 45 years ago. I’d photographed each page and put it on our web site (read it here at "The Abbotsley Story") so I went back to see if this extraordinary plant was there.

​Sure enough, on page 16, we see plant number 37 detailed in both the sketch plan and the plant list, but what it shows is a Yukka Recurvifolia and the problem with that, is that the flowers, the form and the height of the plant don’t quite match what we see in our garden.

​​Strange, wonderful and Intriguing!