Yucca elata

Yucca elata, Soap Tree Yucca, is a tall arborescent Yucca from southwest USA and Northern Mexico with slender sharp-pointed glaucous foliage. Old specimens have a statuesque architectural presence with tall unbranched trunks or typically assymetrical arm-like branches and skirts of dried leaves around the trunks. It grows throughout the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts and is most often found on compact sandy soils in association with desert grasses. An extremely hardy species, Yucca elata can tolerate extended sub-zero temperatures providing it has a free-draining soil. It will withstand frost and snow and can be considered one of the more reliably hardy of the tree Yuccas for UK conditions. In its native range it will often experience rainfall in autumn and winter as well as in early spring and such precipitation will usually induce flowering in mature specimens. Even relatively small plants can produce flowers particularly if they are grown with an unrestricted root-run, ie not in a container. The creamy-white flowers are borne in dense panicles on very tall slender flowerstalks. In its native habitat these flowers are nocturnally pollinated by the Yucca Moth, Tegiticula yuccasella.

These three-year old Yuccas have been grown from seed here in Tropical Britain. The benefits of growing sustainably-grown seed-raised Yuccas are fundamental. They are not ripped from the American deserts like all those large plants imported from Germany and the Netherlands. They will transplant much more easily and with less shock than imported plants or - worse still - unrooted branches (which is how alot of the imported plants start out).