Yucca baccata

Yucca baccata, Banana Yucca, is endemic to the south-western states of the USA and Chihuahua and Sonora states in Mexico where it is found across both arid desert and mountainous regions growing to elevations of 2500 metres. It has attractive rosettes of broad greyish-blue-green foliage that is extremely distinctive being both rigid and strongly keeled with a deep concave/convex profile and thick creamy-white filifers on the brown margins and strong terminal spines. It has a short or occasionally absent trunk that often becomes sprawling and decumbent when older and as it offsets it forms clumping colonies.

Its most widely-used common name derives from its large, green, slightly-curved, fleshy fruit which were an important source of food for First Nation Americans.

In the UK xeric garden it requires a very free-draining alkaline soil composed predominantly of sand, gravel, limestone chippings and grit with very little organic matter added. It should be kept dry from October to March but it responds quickly to watering in the springtime putting on rapid growth. Once growth has been established it can be given a diluted liquid NPK feed throughout the early summer months. 

Yucca baccata is a large broad-leaved species and it has a certain robust presence that gives it a strong architectural and sculptural quality.

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