Yucca Dabble Do!

It has been almost 2 years since I wrote of my attempt to find and then to grow Red Yucca, or Hesperaloe parviflora, here in Kansas. I had first seen this native Texas plant used as a common xeri- landscaping plant in Las Vegas, so I thought I'd give it a try here in dry and windy Kansas. Originally, I purchased three Red Yucca and one yellow-form (Herperaloe parviflora 'Yellow') from High Country Gardens.  The yellow-form Hesperaloe was a larger plant and it bloomed last summer and again this summer, growing slowly but steadily in a protected sunny exposure spot.  In fact, right now, I'm starting to think it is in a spot that's a little too shaded by an adjacent Caryopteris clandonensis.

The small fragile Red Yucca plants, however, really got put to a test in the Flint Hills environment.  All three were planted in a slightly raised bed surrounding a crabapple tree next to my driveway.  This put them directly in one of my worst wind-swept, sun-burnt, winter-cold-exposed beds.  Seriously, the next closest westward wind break for this bed is probably the Rocky Mountains.  As an added bonus, the soil in this bed was originally dull orange subsoil clay.  Daffodils, mums, petunias, you name it, they have all died in this bed.

I'm pleased to report, however, that the  Red Yucca's have done well.  From 4-inch tall plants with 3-4 leaf spikes each,  all three now have a good clump of basal foliage about 12 inches tall, and two of the three bloomed this summer on top of three-foot-tall racemes, as pictured at the left.  The blooms are red outside and yellow inside and are waxy enough to stand up well to the drying winds we've had on the recent hundred-degree days that cause the roses open and shrivel by the end of the day.  And talk about your long-blooming plants! One of my two plants first started blooming at the end of May and still looks as fresh as it did at that time.  I've been holding my breath, thinking that the prairie winds would surely break off the fragile-appearing raceme, but it has so far withstood the worst winds of the summer, including one blast with peak 70-80 mph straight-line winds. The second of my precocious bloomers opened up about two weeks ago and quickly reached the height of its neighbor.

As flowers go, you could safely say that I'm not personally excited by them, and at present this is a mere curosity.  I may change my mind, however, if these plants reach the size and exuberance I saw in Las Vegas.  I haven't seen the hummingbirds that this plant is supposed to attract yet, but I'll give it a few years to make a large mass before I call that part of the experiment a failure.  Till then, other gardeners in the dryer climes of the MidWest might want to give this plant a try.  Heck, as the climate here dries and changes, the native Hesperaloe may make their way to us anyway, becoming weeds in our gardens.  

A Little Piece of Texas

Like most of the US population, Kansans sometimes exhibit a little bit of Texas envy, manifested in the gardening population of Kansas by a desire to grow Texas Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush.  Since neither of the forementioned plants are reliably hardy in my climate (don't think I haven't tried!), I've turned to another native Texas plant to satisfy my yearnings; Red Yucca, also known as Texas Red Yucca or Red False Yucca.

Of course, since I've only been in Texas once, not counting a few hops through the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, I was introduced to Red Yucca (Hesperaloe parviflora) in Las Vegas, where it serves as a common xeri-landscape plant.  I'm sure any native Las Vegans, if in fact there are any, could identify the plant on sight, but I suffered on that particular trip from being in a foreign climate where a) I had no real idea what I was looking at, and b)  neither did any of the people working for the hotels and casinos that I asked.  From experience, I'm guessing that casino dealers and hostesses as a general rule don't spend a lot of time admiring the casino landscaping.  Identification had to wait for my return home and access to a computer, where I recognized Hesperaloe on the High Country Gardens website as the plant I'd just spent three days lusting after.

Hesperaloe parviflora 'Yellow'

Red Yucca is found native to the Rio Grande and northern Mexico area, in the Chihuahuan desert, where it matures to a 2-3 foot high and 4 foot wide succulent mound with narrow blue-green leaves and filamentous edges.  The plant flowers over a long period with inverted bell-shaped flowers of coral red, and it is well-suited for xeriscaping by its drought-tolerant, full-sun requirements and its preference for alkaline soil.  I was happy to see that it's a favored plant by hummingbirds and requires little or no maintenance beyond cutting down the flower stalks.  In fact, one helpful Internet gardener commented that it grows in very poor soil, "virtually no soil," so it seems made for my Flint Hills clay.  It's supposed to be hardy to zone 5, and evergreen to boot, so I'm giving this one a chance in my garden.  I've planted two different varieties from High Country Gardens, the red Hesperaloe and a yellow form (Hesperaloe parviflora 'Yellow'), both in somewhat well-drained poor-soil areas. Both survived the hot, dry summer we just had and needed minimal extra watering for establishment.   The yellow form, pictured at left, is doing great and probably has doubled in size since June, although it hasn't yet bloomed. I have great hope for it as I've seen reports of it growing in Denver, Colorado, and Shawnee Mission, Kansas, the latter just a hop, skip, and dead plant away.

So, once again, I'm stepping out into the murky waters of zonal envy and pinning my dreams for garden excellence on a whimsically-chosen plant glimpsed in someone else's climate.  You'd think I'd learn, expecting providence while staring from warm September down into the depths of a Kansas winter.  You'd think all gardeners would learn, but gardeners, more than all other human strains, seem to remain eternal optimists in the face of repeated failure.