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Aloe schoelleri – A 3 foot wide usually solitary rosette forming aloe with thick stems holding very wide deltoid shaped thick leaves that are at first bright green and aging to gray green with some purple tones, particularly when grown dry. The leaf margins are bright red with well-spaced red teeth. Flowers in mid spring that are densely clustered along few branched tall inflorescences are a peach color with showy exserted bright orange stamens.
Plant in full sun in a well-drained soil with regular, occasional to infrequent irrigation. Should prove cold hardy at least to short duration temperatures down around 20° F. This is a showy aloe a bit like Aloe rubroviolacea but flowering later with lighter colored flowers.
Aloe schoelleri grows hanging from cliffs of the Amba Souara Gorge, at the edge of the Kohaito Plateau in Eritrea near where Aloe camperi and Aloe elegans are also found. It was
described in 1894 by the German botanist and ethnologist Georg August Schweinfurth, but without much detailed information other than he named it to honor the German ethnologist Max Shoeller, who travelled widely in Africa where he met Schweinfurth. It remained seemingly unknown for over a century until the Zimbabwe naturalist Darrel Plowes recognized it was something unusual from near Schweinfurth’s locality and sent plants to the botanical explorer John Lavranos who flowered it, determining it to be the long-lost Aloe schoelleri. The species seems most closely related to Aloe rubroviolacea, which occurs across the Red Sea in Yemen.
Our plants came to us from Steven Duey who through controlled pollination of plants sent to him by John Lavranos and botanical explorer Gary James were able to make plants available in the California succulent nursery trade and through wider distribution through the Huntington Botanic Gardens International Succulent Introductions program as Aloe schoelleri ISI 2020-16 (HBG 136300). The picture on this page courtesy of the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, California.
The information about Aloe schoelleri 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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