Agave deserti (Century Plant or Maguey)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Agave deserti, photographed by velodrome — fig. a velodrome, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-13 / obs. 201781606

Agave deserti, photographed by Jim Riley — fig. c Jim Riley, CC0 1.0 / obs. 183632990

Agave deserti, photographed by Henrik Kibak — fig. f Henrik Kibak, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 182375482

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Native distribution of Agave deserti, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
California	CAL	NORTHERN AMERICA
Mexico Northwest	MXN

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 388 in flower of 2,044 examined

15%

18%

29%

57%

56%

23%

10%

Proportion of examined Agave deserti in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	14	207	7%	4% to 11%
Feb	35	230	15%	11% to 20%
Mar	83	466	18%	15% to 22%
Apr	85	297	29%	24% to 34%
May	83	145	57%	49% to 65%
Jun	40	71	56%	45% to 67%
Jul	6	26	23%	11% to 42%
Aug	2	31	6%	2% to 21%
Sep	0	53	0%	0% to 7%
Oct	5	113	4%	2% to 10%
Nov	15	153	10%	6% to 16%
Dec	20	252	8%	5% to 12%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Agave deserti observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 388 of 2,044 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 3 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Agave consociata Trel.
Agave deserti subsp. deserti
Agave deserti subsp. simplex Gentry

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.