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Hesperoyucca whipplei 'RBG' (Large Our Lord's Candle) - A dense rosette-forming plant to 4 feet tall and 5 feet across with rigid, silver-gray leaves that are margined yellow or brown with a very sharp tip. In the mid-spring into summer, mature plants produce clusters of bell-shaped creamy-white flowers, sometimes tinged with purple, drooping on branched spikes. The blooms are fragrant. After blooming the plant will die, but it sometimes is replaced by numerous offsets (ssp. caespitosa).
Plant in full to part day sun in a decently well-drained soil and irrigate infrequently to not at all. Cold hardy to at least 10°F and tolerant heavy clay soils (if they drain) and resistant to deer predation. The flowers are attractive to moths and other pollinators.
This plant has an incredibly wide native range from the coastal area of San Francisco south into Baja California and east into the southern Sierra Nevada range and Mount San Jacinto. There is even one subspecies (now raised to species level) in the inner Grand Canyon in Arizona.
Our plants of Hesperoyucca whipplei 'RBG' were grown from seed off a large silver form of the species growing at the Ruth Bancroft Garden that their curator Brian Kemble collected. We grew this selected form from 2007 until 2014. For more information on the species see our listing for Hesperoyucca whipplei.
The information about Hesperoyucca whipplei 'RBG' that is displayed on this web page is based on research conducted in our nursery's horticultural library and from reliable online resources. We will also include observations made about this plant as it grows in our nursery gardens and other gardens that we have visited, as well how the crops have performed in containers in our nursery field. We also incorporate comments that we receive from others and welcome hearing from anyone with additional information, particularly if they share cultural information that aids others growing this plant.
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