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Yucca glauca (Small Soapweed) - This is a small, low-growing, clumping yucca with prostrate stems and stiff upright pale green leaves that are 9 inches to 2 1/4 feet long by 1/2 inch wide with white or greenish-white toothless margins that hold many stiff and fibrous threadlike hairs and have a is sharp leaf tip. Greenish cream fragrant flowers usually tinged a rosy-brown, appear in summer on 3 foot stalks.
Plant in full sun in a well-drained soil where it requires little irrigation. This is a very hardy plant, useful for a low barrier or in a succulent garden.
Yucca glauca is a North American species that grows throughout the Midwest in dry plains and sandhills as far north as Canada and south to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The name Yucca was given to the genus by Linnaeus, perhaps by mistake, as it is the Latinized derivation of "yuca", the Caribbean name for Cassava (Manihot esculenta) an unrelated plant in the Euphorbia family that is native to the Caribbean area. Interestingly it was also Linnaeus who applied the name Manihot to Yuca. The specific epithet means "grayish" in reference to the leaf color. We grew this plant on and off from 1995 until 2011 but it really is not a plant that grows that well in coastal California.
The information about Yucca glauca 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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