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Agave 'Blue Glow' - A beautiful smaller Agave with solitary rosettes slowly growing to 2 feet tall and 3 feet across with 18 inch long by 1-1 1/2 inch wide blue-green leaves that have red margins edged with yellow and bearing tiny soft spines and a stout short red terminal spine. When the plant matures it produces a 10 foot tall unbranched reddish flower spike, sometimes solitary but at other time subtended by a multitude smaller 2 to 3 foot spikes, that are covered for most of the length with greenish white flowers with long exserted red stamens.
Plant in full to part sun in a well-draining soil. Little irrigation required. Though hardiness is not known absolutely, this plant has been grown by enough people over a long enough time that we can say that it should tolerate temperatures down to at least 20° F and we suspect the plant should be much hardier. There are reports of it surviving nighttime temperatures of 17° F at the Juniper Level Botanic Gardens at Plant Delights Nursery in November 2008 (but not the 9°F temperature they had later that winter) and others have told us it has gone undamaged at 15° F in Bishop, California and 21° F in Atascadero, California. Great in containers or in groups - especially nice where back lighting can light up the red and yellow margin. Birds and bees go crazy for flowers.
Agave 'Blue Glow' is considered to be a hybrid between Agave attenuata and Agave ocahui and reportedly was a Kelly Griffin hybrid done while he worked at Rancho Soledad Nursery in Rancho Santa Fe. It is a beautiful plant that looks nothing like either parent, though it apparently inherits the more durable tougher leaves, smaller size, solitary habit and sharp terminal spine of Agave ocahui while getting the broader leaves and blue green color from Agave attenuata. There was early confusion with a plant that the Huntington Botanic Garden distributed as Agave 'Blue Glow' with their accession number HBG 89058 indicating it was received in 1989. Their label listed the source as Serra Gardens (then in Malibu) with the listed synonym "Agave 'Jose". It appears now that this similar plant is an older hybrid associated with legendary plant breeder Ed Hummel abd we now list it as Agave 'Red Margin'.
We have also seen this plant described as similar to Agave 'Blue Flame' - while both are in the genus Agave and both have blue-green colored leaves, this is where the similarities end as Agave 'Blue Glow' is a much smaller, solitary plant with stiff leaves and really looks nothing like the large clump-forming soft-leafed Agave 'Blue Flame'. We received our original plant of 'Blue Glow' from the Huntington Botanic Garden in 2005 and the plants to make our crops from when we first started selling it in 2007 from laboratory micropropagated (tissue culture) plants from Rancho Tissue Technologies. We have offered this incredibly popular plant ever since.
This information about Agave 'Blue Glow' displayed is based on research conducted in our horticultural library and from reliable online resources. We also will relate observations made about it as it grows in our nursery gardens and other gardens we have visited, as well how the crops have performed in containers in our nursery field. We will also incorporate comments that we receive from others and we welcome hearing from anyone with additional information, particularly if they can share any cultural information that would aid others in growing it.
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