The Perry Wellness Center campus is the proud home to several beautiful agave cactus or century plants. The main plant and three offshoots are located in the garden park adjacent to Rudy’s Happy Patch Market. Customers often stop to comment and request a cutting.

Explains plant identification specialist Jamie Wadzinski, “We have been overwhelmed with the rapid growth and multiplication of these plants. I guess these cacti enjoy their location! It is about time to dig up some plants and offer them to customers. Many have sold, and we dig them when ordered.”

If you’d like to see the cycle of life played out – slowly – before your eyes, we recommend raising a century plant. It has one remarkable characteristic. After up to 20 years as subdued, non-flowering plant, it blooms once in its lifetime, and then dies. But what a blooming! After years of storing nutrients, the plant produces a flower stalk up to 20 feet high, topped with clusters of gorgeous yellow flowers. The parent plant begins to die soon after, leaving offshoots that provide new plants.

In the photo above, the parent century plant, along with three offshoots, sits in repose beside flowing water in the park on the south side of Rudy’s Happy Patch Market.