Yucca or Adam’s Needle is a gorgeous, tall perennial, ornamental plant for the garden. It is classified as an evergreen shrub that doesn’t shed its needles and it doesn’t have a trunk. It likes dry and sandy soil conditions.
A friend gave me 3 yucca plants in the summer of 2012. Two were planted in the front diamond garden and one in the partly shady front garden. They survived all the snow cover this winter and the leaves were quite hairy at the beginning of the season. Another Linda, of woke up, got out of bed fame, told me that hairy leaves were a good sign the plant would bloom this year. And she was right, but don’t tell her I said so!
This plant grows almost a meter tall (3 feet) and the flower spike gets much taller. The flowers appear at the beginning of summer and looks like white bells.
Here was new growth after the first winter of 2012. There were new shoots telling me the move into our garden was successful. It continued to grow last summer but didn’t give any signs of blooms.
I was thrilled when the flower spikes started to appear this spring. I was out there every day checking the progress. Yucca only blooms when the plants reach a certain age of maturity and they have have their own schedule.
And they kept getting taller and taller and taller and the buds kept getting fatter and fatter and fatter.
And yesterday the buds started opening up. Such a glorious sight.
Beautiful white blooms tinged with a bit of lime green.
Each flower will form a seed pod which should be left to dry on the plant. The seeds have a fleshy coating on them which should be removed before drying and saving. I’ll have pictures of the seed pods and seeds later as I’ll be drying some out and trying to grow them into new plants.
Do you have yucca growing in your garden?
ABC Wednesday letter of the week is Y. Y for yucca.
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