Our daily morning walks around the Mesilla Park neighborhood frequently yield pleasant surprises and discoveries. Earlier this spring, we noticed a century plant starting to sprout up in the yard of an historic old adobe home adjacent to an irrigation ditch that we frequent.
Many weeks after spotting it, it has now grown to be more than 20 feet tall, in full spectacular bloom.
Through a friendship between our goofy Goldendoodle, Chester, and a neighbor’s dog, Duck, we’ve gotten to know the person who lives in the house where the century plant is blooming. He said he had lived in the house for more than 20 years and this is the first time the plant has ever bloomed. Because it is protected by a network of trees, it hasn’t toppled over when our often ferocious spring winds create havoc on trees and other plants in the neighborhood. Our neighbor says he thinks its the tallest variety of the plant he’s ever seen.
We won’t tell you exactly where it is because of the neighbor’s fear that someone might show up and try to hack it down. That’s a sad commentary about how some people regard things of beauty.
At any rate, with all the troubling things in our world right now, I hope that a tall spectacular plant that shows up only once in every 20 years will be seen as a very positive sign.
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