Agaves Variegated Cultivars

Juniper Level Botanic Garden - An Ex-Situ Conservation Garden
Our Mission is to Collect, Study, Propagate, and Share
As of 2020, JLBG has just over 27,000 taxa of living plants, making the collection one of the most diverse in the world. Fundraising for an operational endowment to preserve the garden is underway, administered by NC State University. If you'd like to help preserve the gardens and plant collections for future generations, you can do so with a tax-deductible contribution at JLBG.org and click on the Donate Link.
At Juniper Level Botanic Garden, part of our mission is to educate and share both plants and information. This photo/informational gallery is devoted to cataloging as many variegated century plant cultivars as possible, and credit those who discovered/developed, and introduced them. It is our hope that this can also prevent duplicate use of names and prevent confusion in the trade. In some cases, the originator may have plants for sell or trade. As of January 2018, the gallery features 600 unique cutivars.
Proper nomenclature is often a misunderstood aspect of plant naming, so we'd like to share a few applicable rules from the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants
1- A cultivar name (always in single quotes) can only be used once per genus.
2- Latinized cultivar names have been prohibited by The Code since 1959. These include 'Variegata', 'Marginata', 'Mediopicta', etc. This rule was instituted when it was recognized that there could be dozens of unique margined/centered forms of a single species.
3- Of those Latinized names used prior to 1959, there can still only be one per genus...the first one officially published. Since this is almost impossible to track down with certainly, it is best that all such Latinized names be abandoned.
4-Cultivar names should be nouns in a modern language. 'Golden', 'Crested', 'Ruffled' and not nouns and cannot be used alone as a cultivar name.
Special thanks:
Hans Hansen, who was the first to mass produce variegated agaves by tissue culture...a breakthrough that has allowed more gardeners to acquire variegated agaves at an affordable price, far lower than the exorbitant amounts many of us originally paid for them.
The late Rick Nowakowski of Nature's Curiosity Shop for sharing valuable variegated agave plants, background information, and photos of agaves he both created, and initially distributed.
Stef van Dort of Holland for the tremendous time an effort in sharing images, knowledge, and helping to name previously unnamed cultivars.
All others around the world who have supplied images so that we can all learn.
Information, corrections, and new images are always welcome and can be sent via email to tony@plantdelights.com
Please remember that all images are Copyright property of the photographer and cannot be used for commercial purposed without the permission of the copyright owner. We truly hope you enjoy browsing through the variegated agave plant photo gallery.