This page is about two similar aloes that are in cultivation in California with discussion about their origins and thoughts about whether they might in fact be the same plant. These aloes are Aloe 'Spiney', a plant introduced by the Huntington Botanical Garden through their International Succulent Introduction program as Aloe 'Spiney' (ISI 2014-150) and a plant many of us have been calling Aloe 'Dill Prickles' that was growing at Bill Baker's California Gardens Nursery in Tarzana, California.

The specimen of Aloe 'Dill Prickles' in the California Gardens Nursery garden was a seemingly unbranched small tree aloe that stood 6 feet tall when Randy Baldwin of San Marcos Growers and Jeff Chemnick of Aloes in Wonderland visited there in November 2018. Upon inspection Randy and Jeff saw a couple small pups, one arising from ground level and another smaller one partway up the trunk, and Donna Baker graciously gave each of them one of these plantlets but she did not know if suckers from the base or plantlets on the trunk had been removed previously. Pictures of this plant were circulated to aloe friends to see if anyone recognized it. With only with the stature, the leaves and an emerging inflorescence to go by, there were only guesses as to what this plant was. Until such time as it might be identified, Jeff tentatively gave the plant the creative moniker "Stubble Trouble".

In February 2019 Donna Baker sent pictures of the original plant of Aloe "Stubble Trouble" as it flowered in her garden. These pictures were circulated about with most agreeing it a hybrid, with some speculation it was a Aloe marlothii hybrid, though other thoughts being that it might involve Aloe humilis, Aloe spectabilis, Aloe ferox or Aloe aculeata. It was also at that time that a few of us noted to be similar to the ISI plant Aloe 'Spiney', but 'Spiney' was not described as growing upright with so wide of rosettes as the California Gardens Nursery plant had done. The only thing we could all agree on it that we liked the name Aloe 'Dill Prickles' that Jeff Chemnick had come to call the plant as a placeholder until such time as we could identify it better.

Meanwhile, San Marcos Growers was continuing to build stock of Aloe 'Spiney' since first purchasing a single plant at the Huntington Botanic Garden Succulent Symposium in 2016. It is described on the San Marcos Growers website Aloe 'Spiney' page and in the ISI listing of it on the Huntington Botanic Garden website at Aloe 'Spiney' ISI 2014-15 (HBG 73679). The parentage of this plant as noted in the ISI lisitng is Aloe × spinosissima (a hybrid of A. humilis var. echinata with A. arborescens) crossed with Aloe marlothii. We had long thought Aloe 'Spiney and Aloe 'Dill Prickles' looked vegetatively very similar, but we had yet to be able to compare them both in flower and the early information about 'Spiney' being a much smaller plant kept us from considering it to be the same plant as the larger aloe growing at the Baker's California Gardens. The ISI page noted 'Spiney' to be a clustering plant with rosettes to 1 foot wide, but this Baker plant was more solitary with a couple pups on the 6-foot-tall single trunk with a rosette 24-30 inches wide. By this time however both Jeff and Randy noted that their young plants of Aloe 'Dill Prickles' had suckered, showing that it too was a clustering cultivar and not a more solitary growing one as previously presumed. One thought was that perhaps Bill Baker had removed suckers over the years to propagate and sell in his nursery. Just one of the MANY questions we wish we could ask this amazing plantsman who had died much to young at 62 years old in 2009.

In January 2020 Randy Baldwin visited the South Coast Botanic Garden where he photographed Aloe 'Spiney' in full bloom in their succulent garden. The rosettes on this plant were close to the dimensions of the Baker plant, were getting up a bit on a stem and the flowers were semmingly identical to those of Aloe 'Dill Prickles'. If it an older plant, that possibly grew up on a single stem with suckers removed, one could easily imagine these plants to be the same or at least related. Aloe 'Spiney' was a hybrid created by the late David Verity, who according to David's friend and fellow aloe breeder John Bleck, created many hybrids but had limited room to grow them on, so he would give hybrid seedlings to different friends to try in their gardens and in the process sometimes lost track of some the plants. John Trager, curator of the Desert Garden at the Huntington Botanical Gardens and administrator of the ISI program confirmed that they had received the plant from UCLA Biology professor Boyd Walker, who grew out some of Dave Verity's hybrids at his Pacific Palisades garden. Coincidentally Aloe 'David Verity' (ISI#2001-20) a very attractive large aloe that was named and introduced through the ISI program in 2001 after David also came from the Walker garden. John Trager also noted that size description of Aloe 'Spiney' was based on early container plants as the plant had not been planted out into the ground at the Huntington, so this information regarding its ultimate size needed to be updated. While we are still not sure that 'Dill Prickle' and 'Spiney' are not the same plant, the plants we have compared seem nearly identical and there is speculation that if not the same, that they could very well be sister seedlings that David Verity may have distributed to different people.