Agave parryi

The name century plant is wrong twice over. It's more like twenty to thirty years, and when it happens the plant dies.

Agaves are monocarpic — they flower once. For decades the rosette does nothing but accumulate, packing sugars into thick leaves. Then something triggers, and the plant spends every bit of it at once on a single stalk that can rise fifteen to twenty feet. During the fastest stretch that stalk grows several inches in a day, fast enough that you can mark it and see the difference by evening.

The flowers at the top feed bats — the same lesser long-nosed bats that work saguaro, moving up to agaves later in the season as the corridor continues north. Orioles, bees, and hummingbirds work the lower branches.

Then the rosette collapses and dies, leaving a dry stalk that stands for years.

It isn't a loss for the plant. Agave parryi puts up offsets around its base for its whole life, so the death of a rosette is a generational handoff, not an ending. That clone can persist indefinitely.

The Hohokam and Apache roasted agave hearts in stone-lined pits, and relict cultivated agave stands survive on hillsides in central and southeastern Arizona — plants growing where somebody put them, seven hundred years ago.