Yucca

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, iris, vinca, rock rose, hollyhocks, sweet pea, sea lavender, sea pink, pinks, snapdragon, yellow and blue flax, yellow evening primroses, mums, anthemis, some grasses; Russian thistles gathering at fences.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer, yellow alyssum.
What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, golden spur columbine, purple aster.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitaes are either dark brown or chartreuse.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia, rochea, and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds in cottonwood and catalpa early mornings.
Weather: Morning temperatures were ten degrees warmer earlier in the week; snow receding from the front of the house has uncovered spots of green. Last rain, 1/24/09.
Weekly update: There are times when I’m driving across New Mexico when I feel I’ve slipped into another dimension. It’s been miles since the last settlement and there’s been only grass and barbed wire fronting a road still sloping from the Great Plains to the Rockies. Then the rocks change.
Going southwest along route 152 towards Lordsburg, the ridges start to close in on fields, and suddenly there are great soaptree yuccas, the elatas that resemble palm trees with angry porcupine heads of long, green leaves. Going southeast along 84 to Clovis, just as I’m mesmerized by the passing sameness, the caprock of the staked plains begins, and so do the yuccas. This time they’re shorter, but stalks with the remains of previous seasons’ flowers still stand in huddles.
Last summer I wandered down the ranch road south of my house where the ground swells before dropping to the sandy bed of an arroyo. The road itself falls so steeply, ten-foot high walls rise above my head. I looked up, and there on my left were three yucca sentinels silhouetted against the horizon.
The inward-folding leaves are shorter than other yuccas, less than two feet high, and much, much narrower, no more than a quarter inch wide. Yesterday, they were a dark yellow-tinged green, with fibers escaping the white leaf margins near the bases of the rosettes. Only a few had old flower stalks, and they were ones with few leaves that looked like they were dying. Surrounding them were shorter plants, probably new sprouts from the rhizomatous roots. Maybe sixty clumps grew on both sides of the cut.
In the early twentieth century, the Santa Clara used the saponin-rich roots of Yucca baccata for soap to wash clothing and their hair, a practice that passed to the Spanish who called it amole. The p’a fruits were gathered in fall for food. The dark, relatively wide, inward-sweeping leaves were boiled, then chewed to free the fibers for cordage.
When I moved here several people had Yucca glauca plants with grey leaves several feet high, some with blades that flexed outwards. While my near neighbor has them behind his house, most planted them near the roadside fence where they bloomed this past year in May. Leonora Curtin was told by people to the north that some in the village used palmilla to curdle milk, and heard rumors the sharp-tipped leaves were used as scourges by Los Penitentes.
Generally, yuccas are scarce away from houses here, either because they’ve been cleared for wheat, sheep and cattle, or because they were always selective about their environments at our 6000' altitude. Yesterday, I saw only one wild plant outside the prairie, but ten people had three or four-foot plants with green, straight leaves, and three had ones with reflexed gray ones.
I suspect the ones on the prairie may be the narrow-leaved angustissima, found elsewhere in the county, that grew from black seed brought by the heavy equipment that dug the road. There’s no other explanation for two colonies facing each other across a deep divide. The wind could have blown seed or an animal run up and down the canyon walls, but first there had to be seed and then a direct wind or an animal too dumb to use the road to escape a predator.
Although some glaucas can fertilize themselves when the six creamy-white petals close upon the anthers, most species are pollinated by a yucca moth that perpetuates itself by laying eggs in the fruit. If conditions are wrong, the insects don’t hatch when the plants are in flower. After a bad winter, they may not emerge at all.
Any plant that relies on a single type of moth that can lie dormant for thirty years lives in a different sphere. In that world, those prairie plants are but a few seconds old, and my neighbors’ nurtured specimens mere visitors from the realm of the mundane.
Notes:Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.Dodd, Rhea Jean and Yan B. Linhart. "Reproductive Consequences of Interactions between Yucca glauca (Agavaceae) and Tegeticula yuccasella (Lepidoptera) in Colorado," American Journal of Botany 81:815-825:1994.Powell, J. A. "Longest Insect Dormancy: Yucca Moth Larvae (Lepidoptera: Prodoxidae) Metamorphose after 20, 25, and 30 Years in Diapause," Annals of the Entomological Society of America 94:677-680:2001.Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco, Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.United States Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. New Mexico county distribution maps for angustissima,baccata, elata, and glauca.
Photograph: Narrow-leaf yucca with needle grass along the ranch road, 25 January 2009.