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Agave potatorum "Portillo Nejapa" (Portillo Nejapa Butterfly Agave) - A very nice large form of Agave potatorum with large rosettes to 2 to 3 feet tall by as wide with heavy broad gray upright and slightly recurved leaves that have closely spaced small mammilate margins bearing reddish brown teeth and a terminal spine of the same color. When mature, a flower spike rises 10 to 20 feet bearing light green flowers tinged with red and subtended with red bracts. This agave rarely offsets so, after maturing, which in our experience begins to occur when plants are reach about 10 years of age, it will flower (usually during the fall) and then unfortunately the entire plant declines and dies.
Plant in full sun with little irrigation required in coastal gardens but provide some supplemental irrigation in hotter inland gardens. Winter hardy to around 25 degrees. The species Agave potatorum ranges through the semi-arid highlands between 4,000 and 7,000 feet in Oaxaca and southern Puebla. For information on the species see our listing of Agave potatorum.
The plants offered as Agave potatorum "Portillo Nejapa" were grown by us from seed collected southeast of the town of El Camarón Yautepec, along Hwy 190 south of Oaxaca City. Our previous introduction from this same location area was a selected plant from a 2006 seed collection that has tight symmetrical rosettes and red teeth that we produce vegetatively and market as Agave potatorum 'El Camarón'. These Portillo Nejapa plants are from a 2019 seed collection and as a seedling crop were more variable with a slightly more open rosette, but they are still one of the nicest forms of Agave potatorum. Howard Scott Gentry in his landmark Agaves of Continental North America (University of Arizona Press, 1982) wrote of the plants found "8-14 miles south east of Camarón" that they were "outstanding with large mammilate individual rosettes" and pictured he one in the book with the caption "the large, mammilate leaf form found south of Camarón in southern Oaxaca." The name Portillo Nejapa comes from the name of the small chapel ("La Capillita") located along Hwy 190 just to the south of where these plants were found.
The information displayed on this page about Agave potatorum "Portillo Nejapa" is based on our research conducted about this plant from books in our nursery library as well as from information that is provided by reliable online resources. We also have included our own observations made about it as it grew in the nursery gardens and other gardens visited, as well how the crops of this plant performed in the containers when we had them in our nursery field. We also include comments received from others and welcome hearing from anyone who has information about this plant, particularly if it includes cultural information aiding others to better grow it.
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