By Carolyn Barnes
Town Crier Correspondent
Pat Ley’s century plant tops 30 feet in Los Altos Hills
Gardening, they say, is built into the DNA of the British. And if you can recognize a true plantswoman by her tender solicitude for each and every plant in the garden, Pat Ley of Los Altos Hills qualifies.
This summer, however, most of Ley’s attention focuses on one towering century plant, an Agave americana, more than 10 feet across, with snaky, sword-like leaves covered along their edges with sharp spines. It sat quietly, quadrupling in size, next to the backyard swimming pool for 17 years, during the Leys’ residence. (Ley estimates the plant and the house are about 30 years old.)
Starting on May 6, Ley noticed a rapidly-growing central flower stalk emerging from the plant’s center. Last week, the stalk was about 30 feet high and still growing.
“My husband used trigonometry to calculate its height,” Ley said.
A former president of the Los Altos Garden Club, Ley loves unusual plants, and as an Englishwoman, the exotics of California especially delight her.
“I find them an oddity. I wouldn’t like to live where you couldn’t grow anything else, but this plant is amazing.”
Ley describes the giant emerging stalk as starting like an asparagus, with little leafy things protruding on the sides, which then turned into tiny buds that became arms with bunches of banana-like knobs on the end. Then the knobs became brushes and now the brushes appear to be turning into flowers.
“At the moment, it resembles a strange Norfolk pine. What the end result will be, I don’t know,” Ley said. She does know that after the stalk reaches its full height and finishes flowering, the main, or mother, agave plant will die; its curling leaves reflect the huge effort it has exerted in producing the flower stem. However, a very healthy-looking new plant is budding alongside the mother plant, ready to carry on another generation.
“The plant got so big, we couldn’t open one of the shed doors (there is a garden shed beside the agave), but that doesn’t matter,” Ley said. Its growing conditions have been ideal, with reflected heat from the pool’s pavement and wind protection on three sides - from the shed and a curving fence. The plant receives water from a sprinkler that runs twice per week in the summer for about one-half hour.
From Ley’s perennial beds to her “hot garden”; from the showy epiphyllum, “orchid cactus,” on her front porch to the potted cycads on her back patio, she knows each plant’s exact weekly quotient of water, its common and Latin names, and its best companion plants. A person who finds true happiness in humus, she sees her garden as an ongoing project which never ends but always satisfies.
“I always have a ‘wish list’ in my purse, and I keep an eye out for things on the list when I go to nurseries,” Ley said. “Actually, I find a lot of things at Woolworth’s and also at the garden club’s twice-yearly plant exchanges.”
Her garden is not flashy or bold - except for the remarkable century plant. The planting beds reveal their riches quietly, as Ley describes each plant’s origin and development. Near the century plant, in a poolside raised bed, she groups rosemarys, grasses, oreganos, sun roses , flax, euphorbia and dark leafed sedum.
“This area gets absolutely baked in the summer,” Ley said. “Mostly, I limit my colors to silver, white, blue and yellow and then all the greens; I like to get contrasts with greens.”
The next bed, blessed with some shade, exhibits more of the classic English border characteristics: its depth is emphasized by the use of larger shrubs at the back, including bayberry, spirea, philadelphus, and a persimmon tree. In the middle are fennel, grasses, yellow calla lilies, clevelandia sage, Turk’s cap lilies (planted in gopher baskets), and thistles; along the front are yellow blooming sedum and several low-growing ceonothus.
A vegetable garden, a dry garden, an exceedingly diverse herb garden, many fruit and flowering trees, a separate area for mixed bulbs, and a redwood-sheltered shade garden full of ferns, rhododendrons, native azaleas and prostrate fuchsias are still other separate garden areas, all tended by Ley with the help of a once-a-week lawn gardener.
When not working in her own garden or planning garden tours for the Los Altos Garden Club, Ley volunteers as a member of the Los Altos Hills Committee of Environmental and Landscape Design, which advises residents on landscaping issues.
