Where are my old garden pals?
When I told a landscaping friend more than twenty years ago that I would love to have a swan’s neck agave in my garden because I have always adored the look of the plant but could not find it anywhere, she brought me a little offset from her plant.
Back then, garden designers didn’t plant stuff like agaves and other low-maintenance, water-wise succulent plants, so they weren’t widely available at nurseries. The fatties of those times were mostly dug up from the veld and used in our grandmother’s rock gardens on farms.
Those were the heydays of the tropical style of garden design, closely followed by the Tuscan-type of roses and great swathes of lavender. The filler plants used were miniature blue agapanthus, and when the first miniature hybrid agapanthus sporting pure white flowers came along, the growers had to produce them by the thousand due to great demand! I can still remember the irritation of garden designers and their clients alike if a batch of plants accidentally got mixed on the growing fields, causing a blue-flowering plant in the middle of a patch of the pristine white ones.
