An agave Americana flowered, sometime ago, at the seat of the Marquis of Westminster, which had a 
flower stem twenty-five feet high ; there were 3000 flowers sustained on thirty-two flower stalks, branching 
from the main pedunculus, or flower stem, like a magnificent chandelier. 
Its native country is America within the tropics, from the plain nearly on a level with the sea, to stations 
upon the mountains at an elevation of between 9000 and 10,000 feet; from these regions they have migrated 
eastward in such numbers, as to have established themselves as part of the present flora of the west coast 
of Africa. They are propagated by shoots. 
Plants, perhaps suffer more from invermination and the attacks of insects than from any other means ; 
yet they are subject to other diseases, both of a sporadic and epidemic kind. Some of these even bear a 
likeness to animal disorders, and have, therefore, received similar names, of which Wildenow furnishes a 
catalogue. Thus, plants are affected with atrophy, tabes or consumption, anasarca or dropsy, haemorrhage, 
lepra, verrucee, or warts, chlorosis, icterus, ulcerations, common gangrene, and necrosis, or dry gangrene, 
besides various kinds of deformities, wounds, mutilations, &c. &c. They are likewise subject, especially the 
cacti, to a peculiar kind of sudden death, called by the French “ la mort,” by which, when affected, a branch 
or even a whole plant is as rapidly destroyed as the use of a limb is lost, or death produced in animals by 
apoplexy. 
Plants, although they will bear judicious pruning, resent barbarous operations, and even accidental 
injuries. In them, as in animals, contused wounds, especially contused and punctured wounds, are much 
more dangerous than incised ones ; of this there was an example in the Apothecaries’ garden at Chelsea. It 
was a splendid agave or American aloe ; one of its leaves was pierced with the ferrule of an umbrella by a 
visitor. The parenchymatous substance became diseased ; it sphacelated, and the mortification, which at 
first extended upwards, subsequently began to descend, and travel so rapidly towards the base, as to render 
amputation necessary. The operation was performed, but the mortification had previously extended in an 
insidious manner so far towards, the centre that a fatal termination was probable. As an illustration of the 
vitality of plants, and their proneness to disease from injuries, no example could be more satisfactory; 
but I am sure I need not formally reprobate such wanton mischief. Experiments of all kinds are justifiable, 
but to destroy a noble plant like that, without any object to be attained, could only have been done through 
thoughtless ignorance, for I would not attribute it to any other motive. 
The plant, upspringing from the seed, 
Expands into a perfect flower, 
The virgin-daughter of the mead, 
Wooed by the sun, the wind, the shower; 
In loveliness beyond compare, 
It toils not, spins not, knows no care ; 
Train’d by the secret hand that brings 
All beauty out of waste, and rude, 
It blooms its season, dies and flings 
Its germs abroad in solitude. 
