Yucca

aka:

Great Plains yucca

Spanish bayonet

beargrass

small soapweed

soapweed yucca

In these parts, we just call it 'yucca'

Cathy Fromme Prairie, 1-31-2012

Kingdom Plantae– Plants Subkingdom Tracheobionta– Vascular plants Superdivision Spermatophyta– Seed plants Division Magnoliophyta– Flowering plants Class Liliopsida– Monocotyledons Subclass Liliidae Order Liliales Family Agavaceae– Century-plant family Genus Yucca L.– yucca Species Yucca glauca Nutt.– soapweed yucca

The above information came from this site.  The yucca is a native plant to this area, and is obnoxious enough that it has garnered 'weed' status.  I think it deserves a better classification than that.  It is an iconic plant in this region, and it is very pretty, IMHO.  My grandpa Orin thought so too, because I would venture to guess he photographed at least a hundred of them as he criss-crossed all over Colorado and the southwest years ago. A yucca plant grows to be about a foot tall and produces beautiful white blooms in the late spring/early summer.  It retains the beautiful green foliage all year long, and it is such a pretty contrast when it is covered with snow.  The plant isn't very tasty to animal or human, but it isn't toxic, either.  Many Native American tribes used the fruit/seed pods/roots as a food source.  The fruit was a preferred item, and the root was a last-resort item used in time of famine.  The Keres (Pueblo Indian Tribes of New Mexico) even used the fruit to boil it down into a syrup and make hot chocolate.  I'll take their word for it. I found a long list of various maladies and medical conditions that the Native American tribes of the midwest region used different parts of the yucca to cure.  The Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Dakota, Kiowa, Lakota all used it to treat baldness or promote hair growth.  They must have been on to something, or else it was the same medicine man that traveled from tribe to tribe pitching his natural cure for baldness.  I find it hard to believe that baldness was a true concern at the time...but according to the ethnobiologists that studied these tribes, it was.  The root, after a good pounding, produces a nice soapy froth that was used as a shampoo (hence the name, small soapweed) and as a way to treat lice or sooth the effects of poison ivy.   The juice from the leaves was used as a poison on arrowheads and for fishing - which flies in the face of the claim that the plant is not poisonous.  There are contradictions all over the place on the internet! (So don't you dare use me as a primary source!!) One very interesting fact is the symbiotic relationship between the yucca plant and the pronuba moth.  Neither one can exist without the other.  The moth, in its pupal stage, will remain underground in its cocoon until the yucca is in bloom in the late spring.  The white flowers fully open at night and give off a very particular scent.  The moth detects the scent, emerges from the ground, and begins to pollinate the plants.  The female will gather pollen from the stamen of one plant, visit another, and deposit her eggs in a very specific spot in the ovary, and then shove her ball of collected pollen (3X the size of her head) into a receptacle on the tip of the ovary's stigma.  Pollination then occurs, and when the larvae emerge a few days later, their singular food source (the seeds) is right there, ready to go, housed within the seed pod that also serves as protection for the larvae.  When the larvae emerge from the seed pods, they drop to the ground after a rainstorm (when the ground is soft), dig down a couple on inches and build a cocoon and start the whole process over.  They can remain underground for just a few weeks or for years, until the yucca blooms again.  Fascinating!  If you want to see a pronuba moth, you can find them (when the yucca is in bloom, of course) resting on/within the blooms during the daytime, and between the hours of dusk and midnight, flying from yucca  to yucca as they gather pollen.  They are silvery white in color and about an inch in length.  We have our work cut out for us this coming early summer.  I want to document a yucca in bloom, watch for pronuba moths, and collect a seed pod for study under the microscope. Good stuff!