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Friday, February 14, 2025

A Resilient Backyard Plant and a Scrumptious Vegetable


There are a myriad standards when choosing crops to populate a backyard or cultivated panorama: resilience, kind, texture, multi-seasonal curiosity when it comes to foliage, flowers, and fruit—and, for kitchen gardeners, cooks, and yard foragers, is it edible? As summer season begins to say itself, yucca, readying to show its statuesque floral attraction, is reminding us that it checks each field. And several other extra. The creating flowering stem of yucca resembles an infinite asparagus stalk, and when it branches into a large number of buds, every plant is reworked right into a luminous floral candelabra, liked by pollinators, hummingbirds, and people.

Images by Marie Viljoen.

Above: Yucca in bloom in Brooklyn, New York.

The place I stay within the Northeast, the regionally conspicuous yucca is Yucca filamentosa. It’s used extensively in city parks and public gardens and has unfold to develop wild alongside shorelines, in outdated dunes, in pine barrens, and in sunny fields. Native to the Southeastern United States, this yucca has naturalized nicely past its native area. It’s impressively hardy, all the way down to USDA zone 4 (the place it might want some safety from winter winds).

Above: Naturalized, feral Y. filamentosa on the sides of Jamaica Bay, New York.

On the plant walks that I lead, it by no means fails to shock people who this sharp plant will not be a denizen of the desert (though it has many desert—in addition to tropical—yucca family by means of the Americas).

Above: The telltale filaments of Y. filamentosa.

The species—filamentosa—tells us one thing in regards to the plant: it refers back to the hair-like fibers that fray from every spiked leaf.

Above: A variegated horticultural cultivar is Y. filamentosa ‘Colour Guard’

Above: Sensible planting permits the leaf-swords of yucca to glow when backlit.

Regardless of rising fortunately within the rain-rich Northeast, Y. filamentosa has yet one more high quality to suggest it to horticulturists. It’s water-wise. This can be a resilient plant, requiring no extra irrigation as soon as established. And there’s extra: These stabbing leaf-points are a pure deterrent the place one is perhaps wanted, in public or personal plantings; consider it as a botanical porcupine, or a dwelling safety plant. Individuals (and deer!) hold their distance. There are different bonuses, for both the just-plain-curious or for the survival-obsessed: Yucca’s leaves present cordage, and the dry flower stalks will help you make hearth. It’s pounded root might aid you poison and catch fish. It’s a plant for the apocalypse. However that’s one other story…

Above: Cool white yucca flowers—eat the petals; the anthers and pistil are bitter.

Talking of the foundation: When it comes to consuming yucca, there’s a hurdle, and it’s semantic: Yucca will not be yuca.



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