Yucca constricta

Yucca constricta, Buckleys Yucca, is a low, usually trunkless Yucca that grows on the thin alkaline prairie soils of west-central Texas with a range that stretches west beyond the prairie into the Trans-Pecos and south through the Texas Hill Country and across the southern plains down to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a smaller-statured Yucca with long, very narrow leaves resembling the more widespread and northerly-growing Yucca glauca. Like Yucca glauca the foliage can be a pale blueish-green and the two are not easy to tell apart particularly when young although the white leaf-margins on Yucca constricta tend to be more filiferous with each individual fibre a little longer and more distinctively curly. The linear foliage is also more flexible and less stiff than Yucca glauca. It can have individual rosettes but often forms low clumps with many growing points. When it does form a trunk it is often short and prostrate or procumbent. The fruit capsules have a distinctive constriction in the middle hence the name.

In cultivation in the UK, Yucca constricta needs a well-drained raised bed with plenty of rock, grit and limstone added to the substrate. It is hardy but will benefit from the protection of a heavy-guage fleece in extremes of cold. It will endure winter wet better than an Agave but is less tolerant than the very wet-tolerant species like Yucca gloriosa, Yucca glauca, Yucca filamentosa or Yucca aloifolia.

Yucca constricta is rarely available and we have a limited quantity of seed-raised plants.