Yucca, yucca, yucca

    

This is for Merle, whose eighteen month old yucca has yet to bloom.  Of course I noodled my way across the internet, and have pretty much confirmed yucca behavior we observed here at home.

Our yucca is close to twenty five years old.  Jan planted one here in the corner after the sidewalk was laid, twenty five years ago. 

It grew, but never bloomed.  Then another yucca sprang up ten feet away, and then one behind it.  They bloomed.  So did the original yucca.

Our conclusions:

Yucca roots travel and send up new plants until they find their happy place, and bloom.

Yucca are incredible resilient.  Tom is a burn and destroy kind of guy; he will weed whack any area of green taller than his ankles.  This front garden has been relentlessly weed whacked, and only one yucca has succumbed.

All these plants have been weed whacked each fall, so they have a misshapen appearance. The leaves should be at least twice as tall and pointed, not sliced off near the ground. Another testament to their hardiness.

   

(Interestingly, when the kids and I screened all that dirt in this garden, and sorted out the plants we wanted to keep, Hamilton found one lavender plant with a stalk more than an inch thick, with a few puny leaves struggling from the sides.  I planted a lavender bed there twenty five years ago, and it bloomed away for the couple of years prior to weeding by whacking.  The survivor is happily nestled with the new lavender.)

From the net:

All yucca flowers are white and pollinated by moths at night.

A group of many flowers is called an inflorescence.

The flowers appear from midsummer to mid-fall.

The plants grow very slowly to maturity, then bloom. (No additional information of the age of maturity.) 

When a yucca does bloom, it can be expected to bloom the same time each subsequent year.

Yucca can be transplanted in the fall; just slice through the root and move the plant to another full sun location.

The front flower bed faces another face lift in the fall; the day lily bed will be ruthlessly thinned, and the yucca will be moved back from the sidewalk’s edge.  I counted ten additional yucca plants crowded around the original, and another ten around the happy bloomer, the fellow that escaped and now has the tallest bloom every year. Let’s see if I can give them happy new homes in the garden.