Agave victoriae-reginiae

[Melt in the Sun]

Weird...you're right, I never would have guessed that.

[Brooksphilly]

Danny, you'd never guess this is the same plant below only 2 years ago (check out the pot - still in the same one). I got it from the local nursery, didn't think it was anything special, so sometime after the below photo I thew it out to fend for itself in full sun. It responded by growing all new very short and wide leaves. If you look at the group photo above, you can still see some of it's old skinny leaves down at the bottom. It's pretty amazing that it's current form appears to be purely a function of the full sun situation it's received now for the 2nd growing season.

2015 08 21 A vr Friedmans.JPG

What the... seriously?!? That is pretty amazing. Not only is it tighter (which one would expect with better light), it's basically a different leaf structure. i would have never put 2 and 2 together from those 2 pics.

[Spination]

Honestly, I'm just as surprised as anyone could be. If I hadn't seen it for myself, it would be tough to believe, and impossible to have predicted.

[mcvansoest]

I wonder if that was the AVR version of etiolated?

[mcvansoest]

This is not AVR, but Agave nickelsiae, but you can see something similar going on, not quite as dramatic, but still when I got the plant it was much thinner leaved and longer leaved, and now after a couple of years in the ground getting a good amount of sun you can see the leaves getting broader and broader and also a little shorter. At first I thought it was working towards blooming (and who knows it still might), but it has been going on long enough now that an adjustment to sun exposure and/or other growing conditions could also be suspected to be the cause.

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[Brooksphilly]

Mcvan, that is a beauty! You can really get a sense for how dramatically different if has become in your care. Wonder how much is doe to better light versus being in ground.

[mcvansoest]

Thanks, Brooks, that is a good question. I suspect both would help, I guess I need to put one of my potted pups from that plant in more light. They are hanging out under 50% shade cloth, and definitely showing a more elongated habit, but of course given that they are in pots and in less light it is not really a way to distinguish.

I have a second similarly sized one in the ground that is in less light now that a Palo Verde that had fallen over a few years ago got serious about regrowing and in the heat of summer I have not had the courage to tackle it and chop it back down to stump size. It is still showing the more compact look, but and it is hard to truly see from the picture not quite as pronounced as the plant that gets more light:

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This one is doing some interesting twistiness in the core, given the leaves an extra interesting feature.

I can definitely say that once they hit the ground and get settled they started growing a higher pace, in pots they have been really slow. I just looked at pictures of my two probably AVR 'compacta' and they definitely are not showing what Spination's plant is doing, but then they did start out with pretty wide stubby leaves to begin with.

[jayhouseplant]

I regret opening this thread...

Your pictures make me want to get one one of these... or maybe 10...

[agavegreg]

Here are a few shots of A. victoriae-reginae from the Huasteca Canyon area in Nuevo Leon.

[Gee.S]

^ It's almost startling to see those habitat examples so clean and unblemished.

[jayhouseplant]

Even the dead one looks stunning

[Melt in the Sun]

Awesome pictures! Good to see you poke your head in here Greg.

[agavegreg]

Awesome pictures! Good to see you poke your head in here Greg.

Thanks Danny. Keeping quite busy, but will share some more pics when I can.

[agavegreg]

A few shots of Agave nickelsiae, named for Anna B. Nickels who owned a nursery in Laredo, Texas and pillaged and plundered plants of NE Mexico in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Also hybrids between A. nickelsiae and A. lechuguilla, and A. nickelsiae and A. asperrima. These are on a hill to the east of Saltillo.

[Melt in the Sun]

Wonderful plants...one of my favorite species. Do you know the Hechtia (?) that grows with it?

[Stone Jaguar]

Greg:

A few shots of Agave nickelsiae, named for Anna B. Nickels who owned a nursery in Laredo, Texas and pillaged and plundered plants of NE Mexico in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Also hybrids between A. nickelsiae and A. lechuguilla, and A. nickelsiae and A. asperrima. These are on a hill to the east of Saltillo.

From Starr (2012), "Roland Gosselin named this plant in honor of Anna B. Nickels, the intrepid plant collector from Laredo, Texas."

While these descriptions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, in isolation the former quote is pretty derisive while the latter seems to imply some degree of admiration for her work. I am somewhat familiar with Mrs. Nickels and her Arcadia Garden due to my interest in late 19th century New World naturalists and ornamental plant collectors. From my read, she seems to have been well-regarded by the noteworthy cactus specialists and rare plant fanciers of her time. In the mid to late 1800s, a woman C&S collector and nursery owner based on the edge of the southwest Texas frontier was quite the rara avis. Indeed, without getting to far into the weeds, one might even make the case that she might make a very interesting subject for a biography. Given her relationship to the Agave ovatifolia/"noah" story and your path having literally crossed hers in NE Mexico, I assume that you know a great deal about her. Other than being a commercial collector/amateur bioprospector who, no doubt, extracted and sold many, many thousands of wild-collected plants when this was a perfectly acceptable practice as a nursery owner, what is her failing?

Great photos of both spp., by the way.

Jay

[Spination]

I just took it as humor. Disclosure: I have an offbeat sense of humor, so that could be why.

[Stone Jaguar]

Yes, perhaps that's how it was meant to be read but not clear to me that's the case. If so, mea culpa.

[agavegreg]

Greg:

A few shots of Agave nickelsiae, named for Anna B. Nickels who owned a nursery in Laredo, Texas and pillaged and plundered plants of NE Mexico in the late 1800's and early 1900's. Also hybrids between A. nickelsiae and A. lechuguilla, and A. nickelsiae and A. asperrima. These are on a hill to the east of Saltillo.

From Starr (2012), "Roland Gosselin named this plant in honor of Anna B. Nickels, the intrepid plant collector from Laredo, Texas."

While these descriptions are not necessarily mutually exclusive, in isolation the former quote is pretty derisive while the latter seems to imply some degree of admiration for her work. I am somewhat familiar with Mrs. Nickels and her Arcadia Garden due to my interest in late 19th century New World naturalists and ornamental plant collectors. From my read, she seems to have been well-regarded by the noteworthy cactus specialists and rare plant fanciers of her time. In the mid to late 1800s, a woman C&S collector and nursery owner based on the edge of the southwest Texas frontier was quite the rara avis. Indeed, without getting to far into the weeds, one might even make the case that she might make a very interesting subject for a biography. Given her relationship to the Agave ovatifolia/"noah" story and your path having literally crossed hers in NE Mexico, I assume that you know a great deal about her. Other than being a commercial collector/amateur bioprospector who, no doubt, extracted and sold many, many thousands of wild-collected plants when this was a perfectly acceptable practice as a nursery owner, what is her failing?

Great photos of both spp., by the way.

Jay

Sorry for the misunderstanding. Yes, it was supposed to be taken as humor and those that know me and have seen me give talks would get it better than those who do not know me personally. Yes, I do admire anybody who was able to set up travels in Mexico in the late 1800's early 1900's, hiring laborers and burros. I realize that at that time, the collecting and selling of wild plants was not given a second thought, but I have to wonder if that was not a contributing factor to the current paucity of plants such as Hesperaloe parviflora in the wild these days. I do not know her story well, so have no opinion except for admiration in making her way at that time, but at the same time having a feeling of melancholy about the possible loss of plant material.

To SJ, I would be interested in any material you may have regarding Anna Nickels and any other explorers of NE Mexico from that time frame.

Glad you like the photos, Agave nickelsiae is truly a stunning plant.

[Stone Jaguar]

Greg:

A thousand pardons that I misunderstood the joke here, but there seems to be so much application of 21st century conservation mores to 19th century commercial and scientific practices these days that I feared you had gone over to the Dark Side

From what I can gather, Anna Buck Nickels was born in 1832 and died in 1917, married twice, and had one son (Benjamin Eells) with her first husband whom she lived with into her final years. In a letter and list offering plants to Kew in 1887, she claims to have been collecting cactus for 25 years, so it looks like she got the bug at about 30 years of age. The Arcadia Garden nursery carried a LOT of plants other than C&S, including dry tolerant ornamental bulbs, grasses and ferns. She was profiled in a Texas C&S journal in 1971 but I have not been able to get a copy of that note. It would be great to go over it. As you know, there are several of her wholesale C&S price lists from the late 1890s archived online, one of which is quite interesting since it provides a useful comparison to prices today.

For those who have not seen them, one here: https://archive.org/details/CAT31282637" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It is interesting to note that she lists small plants of Agave Noah (=ovatifolia) at 50.00 per hundred FOB Laredo (this would have been loaded on a rail car), twice the price of field-collected victoriae-reginae. Presumably this differential reflects the relative rarity at the time and the difficult in extracting "Noah" plants from middle and upper parts of the Sierra de Lampazos. In constant dollar terms, this translates into about USD 15.00 and 7.50 each in 2017 dollars. Since USD 9.00-10.00 for a 60 hour week would have been the going rate for rough labor at the time, 25 or 50 cents for a plant at wholesale level was quite a lot of money for working folk. Northeast Mexican campesinos hired as informal collectors would have earned a fraction of the wages mentioned.

Natural history antiquarian booksellers in the US and Europe used to stock turn of the century rare plant catalogues fairly regularly (esp. Veitch, Sanders, etc.), but, offhand, I have not seen one of hers listed. From memory, there also were at least two dealers in Brownsville a the turn of the century who sourced wild Mexican plants and animals for museums, public gardens, collectors and zoos.

Also see page 526 of Safford's 1908 publication, "Cactaceae of Northeastern and Central Mexico" below, for a brief narrative regarding her leaving her garden behind in Laredo to live with her son in central Mexico.

https://books.google.com/books?id=hIE5A ... us&f=false" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Her life in SW Texas appears to have spanned the period between the American Civil War and the opening rounds of the Mexican Revolution. The region surrounding Laredo has never been bucolic, but the years that she collected plants in the Rio Grande valley and NE Mexico were particularly tricky. She must have been a very resourceful, tenacious and intelligent - not to mention brave- woman. As you note, many of these collections had to be transported by backpack, mule or horseback from isolated areas to be then transferred to oxcarts and mule driven wagons to be finally delivered at the nearest rail spur for the journey north.

I have to go through my boxed library to gather up more material on the NE Mexican collections story but I do have quite a bit. I strongly suggest that you read the wonderful compilation, "Mexican Game Trails" (Carmony and Brown 1991) and whatever plant volumes you can get of "Biologia Centrali Americana" (Salvin and Godman 1879-1915) for additional color. Famed British naturalist Osbert Salvin's talented and eloquent wife Caroline (a gifted botanical illustrator in her own right) provides wonderful insights into the wonders and travails that 19th century botanists encountered in the field in Mesoamerica in her, "A Pocket Eden: Guatemala Journals 1873-74. Many of of the bird and mammals collectors out collecting in the SW and Mexico for American and European museums, part. the U.S. National Museum of Natural History, during this period also collected noteworthy plants.

Populations of some horticulturally desirable orchids that were known to have been heavily collected in Guatemala and Chiapas in the early and mid 19th century (see Bateman, "Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala", 1845, and others) had recovered to levels of relative frequency and abundance by the mid-1970s. Sadly, they have since been re-extirpated in many areas. The Mexican Revolution and the aftermath effectively shut down bioprospecting in much of Mexico for decades. I suspect the "missing parts" that you and others perceive are of recent vintage, rather than 19th century collecting pressures, as formidable as they probably were on readily accessible plant populations.

Happy Trails,

Jay

[agavegreg]

Thanks Jay,

Looks like you have delved deeply into the collectors and explorers of that time period. Good to know that the past is not lost on everybody. It is very cool to learn about the routes taken and try to retrace some of them. Unfortunately, as time marches on, towns and cities spring up in old localities and we lose some of those making it difficult to know if we are actually in the same spot.

Thanks for the info and links. Looks like I have some reading to do!

Greg

[SC FM]

Spination, what a beautiful collection!

[ABNickel'sFan]

Greetings, new member here.
My joining has less to do with my knowledge or love of cactus than with a project filling in the gaps of the Anna B. Nickels biography.
When my search engine pulled up this thread, I thought I'd join to ask if anyone has made further progress on ABN. From what I've seen, I have several things you might not have seen and would be happy to share.
Part of my interest in Nickels is that I grew up in Laredo.
Thanks,
Dan
Lakebay, Washington

[Meangreen94z]

I’ll have to look into this further. Maybe take a trip to Laredo as well, and see if any remnants of her collection remains. Seems really interesting.

[ABNickel'sFan]

I’ll have to look into this further. Maybe take a trip to Laredo as well, and see if any remnants of her collection remains. Seems really interesting.

A trip to Laredo is one thing, but finding any remnants of Nickels' Arcadia Garden on Matamoros St. is another. There's a parking lot there now. Perhaps there are plants still growing in people's gardens or propagated from her stock, but the Arcadia Garden of 130 years ago is long gone. See screenshot from Google's Streetview.

In the intervening years, the Shiner Cactus Nursery in Laredo had a fair-sized wholesale-retail operation going with a catalog and mail-order. The real brains behind that business was Mrs. Shiner, Margaret Sackville, who after divorcing Mr. Shiner set up the Cactus Gardens Café on San Bernardo Ave on the San Antonio Highway. Her Cactus Gardens Café had low-quality food but a fantastic greenhouse in back full of interesting cactus until the late 1970s.

Of course, Laredo's greatest claim to fame in the world of cactus is its location right on the edge of the only US Lophophora williamsiae habitat and its history of hosting Native Americans buying their sacred plant and exporting peyote to stoners around the country.

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