Agave Americana - three days

OK, next photo I will put a human in alongside for comparison. This plant has so many uses - I have snitched this description from Wikipedia:

"If the flower stem is cut without flowering, a sweet liquid called agua miel ("honey water") gathers in the heart of the plant. This may be fermented to produce the drink called pulque, which may then be distilled to produce mezcal. The leaves also yield fibers, known as pita, which are suitable for making rope, matting, coarse cloth and are used for embroidery of leather in a technique known as piteado. Both pulque and maguey fibre were important to the economy of pre-Columbian Mexico. Production continues today to a much lesser extent. Agave syrup (also called agave nectar) has recently been marketed as a healthful natural sugar substitute."

This is not the agave which produces my favourite product tequila, which actually comes from unsurprisingly Agave Tequilana aka the Blue Agave.

I once had an online forum discussion with someone who complained bitterly about this "cuckoo in Spanish Nature" (my words). This successful plant has established itself all round the world, even in Australia and New Zealand. It has been in Spain for nearly five centuries now, brought back like so many plants by botanists like Ruiz, Banks, Nee, Darwin and others.

It is totally naturalised and if we started to write lists of plants introduced from the New Worlds it would make a nonsense of the whole business of how plants develop and move ie ie seed pods carried by the sea to another land; seeds carried by birds and dropped serendipitously; or seed moved by the winds and so on.