Agave jaiboli

Jankol · #1

Agave jaiboli (GENTRY 1972) of the Crenatae group in the English National Agave Collection.

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#2

Interesting anecdote from "Finding the Hidden Garden" by Gary Paul Nabhan

Once Gentry began his stories from the trail, they would unwind naturally. He often returned to a point he had wanted to demonstrate to me earlier in the day. When recording folk taxonomies for plants, he insisted, be careful of campesinos making up provisional names for plants in areas unfamiliar to them. Then he would laugh heartily and confess that in 1951, he had provisionally named one species Agave jaiboli after what he thought was an Indian name. In the Sierra de la Ventana, he had encountered a gente de razon (non-Indian) who told him that a fine distilled drink could be made from this unusually sweet plant. The man had called the distilled drink jaiboli, to distinguish it from the mescal that the Guarijo Indians made from temeshi, another local agave. Fourteen years later, Gentry ran into the man again and learned that he had worked as a wetback years before on the US side of the border. While in the United States, the man had taken a liking to the highballs that the Gringos made with their liquor. “Aqui, hacemos jaibolis con mescal,” he told Gentry, who belatedly realized that jaiboli was no Indian word at all. The name stuck nonetheless, and Gentry used it for the official scientific name when describing the plant as a new species in 1972.