Next Year's Christmas Tree

My neighbor Merry clued me in to a common "Christmas Tree" in South Africa. It is sparse but it is perfectly shaped and very strong. But it is actually not a tree at all. It is the flower which grows in the middle of the giant Agave americana, a native plant of tropical America. It is also commonly and confusingly called an American aloe, although it is not an aloe at all. Merry has one where she teaches school. The teachers take turns every year cutting it down for use as their home Christmas tree.

The Agave americana occurs in abundance in the Karoo and the arid highland regions of South Africa. Introduced by the British settlers in 1820, the plant was originally cultivated and used as emergency feed for livestock and it is everywhere. Today when cultivated, it is used mainly for the production of syrup and sugar.

I first saw these huge flowering agaves in the Ruth Bancroft Garden east of Oakland, California. The Ruth Bancroft Garden is the first garden selected in North America to be preserved by the Garden Conservancy. My garden club friend Barbara is a docent there and she took me on a tour of Ruth's garden during the Garden Conservancy's open visiting days. She told me that the agaves mature very slowly and die after flowering, but are easily propagated by the offsets from the base of the stem. 

I remember distinctly thinking at the time that the flowers did look like they would make great Christmas trees. Who knew?

Here they are in buckets outside a shop in picturesque De Rust in the Klein Karoo.

And I guess this must be the South African equivalent of an American Christmas Tree Farm!

"O Christmas tree!...

O Christmas tree! ...

Could this be next year's Christmas tree?" *



* sung to the tune of O Tannenbaum.