You’re Being Lied to About Agave Utahensis var. Eborispina

The first time Agave utahensis subsp. eborispina was formally described, it was by Jay Pinckney Hester, in 1943. Among other details, he noted its spines:

The cover of the 1943 CSSA Journal in which Hester first described eborispina.

terminal spine elongated, slender, pungent, straight or sinuate, brown in youth, Ivory in age, usually curved inward, 10-20 cm. (4 in. to 8 in.) long, 6-10 mm. wide at the base

Then, in his seminal 1982 book, agave legend Howard Scott Gentry did the same:

Terminal spine 10-20 cm long, large, thick, ivory white; teeth larger, coarse, crooked.

Variety eborispina, when well developed is very distinctive, the large, elongate, ivory white spines making it easily recognizable

In 2008, Zlatko Janeba, writing in the Cactus and Succulent Society Journal, agreed:

In clear distinction, A. nevadensis (the Nevada Agave) has smaller rosettes, more-bluish leaves, larger teeth, and more-elongated spines than the utahensis type. Eborispina (the Ivoryspined Agave) is the most distinctive and, to my eye, the most beautiful, with extremely long (up to 15 cm!) ivory white spines at each leaf tip. It bears the distinction of being the northwesternmost member of the entire genus.

And in 2010, this time in Czech journal Kaktusy, he went on to specify:

Medium-sized agaves, caespitose, with rosettes up to 60 cm broad (usually smaller); the terminal spine (5–) 10–15 cm long, ivory white, straight or sometimes curly (especially in juveniles); flowers and seeds like those in subsp. utahensis.

Agave utahensis subsp. nevadensis on the left and Agave utahensis subsp. Eborispina on the left. Note the stark difference in terminal spine length.

For more than 70 years, experts have agreed: Agave utahensis subsp. eborispina has terminal spines at least 10cm long. And sometimes up to 15 or 20 centimeters. For my American readers, 10cm is approximately 4 inches. Whereas Agave utahensis subsp. nevadensis has significantly shorter spines, according to both Janeba and Gentry. In the latter’s 1982 book:

Nevadensis: Terminal spine 3-8 cm long, slender, brown to whitish; teeth relatively small

And the rest of the taxa of Agave utahensis—kaibabensis and “regular degular” utahensis—both have shorter spines.

A small selection of the obviously-not-eborispina plants being sold as eborispina.

If a mature Agave utahensis has spines shorter than 10cm, or 4 inches, its not eborispina. However, when we start looking at the “eborispina” plants available for sale online, many of then, maybe even most of them, have spines shorter than 10cm. What gives?

Well, primarily, what’s going on is that demand for eborispina is higher than for other forms of utahensis, and thus plants labeled “eborispina” sell faster, and for higher prices. And these sellers were either lied to by their suppliers and don’t know better, or are actively lying themselves. I can accept the former excuse for individual sellers, but for large companies (of which there is at least one lying about eborispina) I think the latter is probably the truth. Many times these are the same companies that sell plants dug up from the wild, so lying isn’t really that far out of their ethical wheelhouse.