SOME PLANT.

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 07-JUL-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

For fifty years, the Agave americana at the New York Botanical Garden's Enid A. Haupt Conservatory led an exemplary, if somewhat artificial, life. Five feet high and ten feet across, the specimen would occasionally drop one of its fleshy, gray-green leaves or send up a new shoot, known as a "pup." What, exactly, got into the agave this spring no one is quite sure, but in March the plant began to swell noticeably. The conservatory manager, Francisca Coelho, went home one Friday, and by the time she returned,...

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