Price range for Yucca rostrata

[Azuleja]

I decided I want several Yucca rostrata to plant behind my Agave ovatifolia and then I looked at the price at a local nursery and changed my mind. They're listed at $500 for 25 gallon size. I don't actually need them that big and couldn't afford it anyway. Somewhere between 5-15 gallon would be nice. Is it unreasonable to think I might find some around $60 ea?

[Gee.S]

$500/25 gal sounds about right. Good luck! I have seen smaller plants for under $100 occasionally, but never anything at BB.

[Azuleja]

Good to know, thank you. I guess it was silly of me to think I'd be getting five of them.

[Gee.S]

If you're not in a hurry: Yucca rostrata

[Spination]

lol I guess that easily puts into perspective what 10-20 (?) years is worth, when considering the price of the biggie.

[Azuleja]

If you're not in a hurry: Yucca rostrata

Yeah, I'd like a little more of a jump start than that. The nursery has some smaller pots than the 25 gallon, I'm just not sure if they're under $100. I'll check the next time I go.

ETA: Looks like $150 for those smaller ones.

[Bananaguy]

Those are awesome looking ones in that picture. I have a tiny seedling that grow really slow but still healthy. Reason why even tiny ones cost outrageous is because it takes them so long to grow to trunking size. They built a Lone Star here last year and have 8 rostrata in a rock bed. It hit a all time record low of 6 degrees for a few hrs a couple weeks ago. A few are kinda yellow others alright. They are anywhere to 2-4ft tall. They grow here perfectly fine and wish more places planted them. Good luck finding a good one.

[Stone Jaguar]

I'm sure the Monger and others in the trade here will confirm that these yuccas have a huge following in CA/AZ landscaping now and I have seen them sell off the back of the delivery truck at Flora Grubb in San Francisco for USD 750 at this size. While the do grow at an acceptable pace when planted out and pampered in the right environment, I wonder whether some of the larger plants being sold are ex-Texas wild-collected/salvage plants that have been field or box grown out in the desert for a couple years to clean up their appearance?

As for the "blue" clones being marketed, I have seen plenty of very "blue" leaf plants jumbled up with "normal" looking things. I keep the ones I grow "blue" with a handful of dolomite worked into the topsoil in the dripzone every year.

[Azuleja]

The pricing is fair considering the time it takes to grow them. What made me want some so badly was this gallery photo for A. ovatifolia at the Bryce Thompson Arboretum by toditd. The two look so beautiful together. I'm happy today because the nursery has them in 5g and 15g in addition to the big sizes.

[toditd]

They do look fantastic together don't they? Their contrasting architecture works quite well together.

I bought a tiny Y. rostrata in October 2015 in a 5.5" high x 5" wide pot for an easily affordable $12.95. I wonder if it'll have a trunk before I'm pushing up daisies ... I mean agaves and aloes. With my rostrata, if it was planted behind an A. ovatifolia, the ovatifolia would soon overwhelm and hide the rostrata. I'd be better off planting the rostrata in front.

Glad I could be an enabler! And I'd love to see what you come up with!

[Azuleja]

They do look fantastic together don't they? Their contrasting architecture works quite well together.

I would add the red bark of a large manzanita and then park my chair there.

[Viegener]

Annie's Annuals has small plants of Yucca rostrata 'Sapphire Skies' for $10. I got one last year, since I have 3 regular Yucca rostrata in 2 gallon pots. I'm ok waiting for these to grow. Other things are racing ahead so fast they scare me.

[toditd]

I would add the red bark of a large manzanita and then park my chair there.

That would be perfect!

Just off the left side of that photo are 3 of the most comfortable old wrought iron chairs. Each time I visit Boyce Thompson Arboretum I park myself in one of those chairs, relax, enjoy the scenery, and let all the cares of the world fade away.

[abborean]

[quote=", I wonder whether some of the larger plants being sold are ex-Texas wild-collected/salvage plants that have been field or box grown out in the desert for a couple years to clean up their appearance?
.[/quote]
Most of the ones available from south TX wholesalers (that I'm aware of) are propagated from rooted top cuts. You get them in and they are squarish at the bottom with a few roots. These are much cheaper ($180 for a 4 footer) than what I've seen quoted in this post but are not as pretty. Must be able to buy wholesale quantities. Not saying some of them aren't grown as you say of course.

[Agavemonger]

These plants are always quite expensive in larger sizes because they are exceptionally slow-growing, especially in pots. They need to develop a massive underground rhizomatous, woody root structure before they are truly happy and decide that they actually want to grow much more than a few "survival" leaves.

I have found that in Southern California that almost all (if not all) Yuccas seem to need to be WAY over-potted, and they should be kept WET throughout the growing season. They grow much faster when fertilized well and kept wet during the growing season. They need much more water than you would ever think they would. I put about ten different varieties into the ground last spring in my new landscape; they are SO much happier in the ground then they ever are in pots. They are growing about ten times as fast as they ever did in pots.

Most Yuccas develop traveling underground woody, fibrous root tipped rhizomes that can be truly massive. That is what makes them so incredibly drought tolerant. Even the smaller "Delicate-looking" Yuccas, in habitat, can have foot-thick underground root/rhizome masses the size of the hood on a car. You simply wouldn't believe it until you see it for yourself. In Texas, on a seed-gathering trip a few years ago, I stumbled on an area where a Bulldozer had "cleared" a plot of land where houses were soon to be built. The heavy equipment had pushed aside about the top foot or two of top-soil into windrows on the side of the project. There were literally hundreds of large pieces of the truly gorgeous species Yucca palida mixed into the windrows at about fifty-fifty with soil. The pieces were so massive that I couldn't pull them out of the windrows. I resolved to salvage at least a little of this wholesale slaughter, so I went down to an Ace hardware and bought a shovel. A lot of the broken pieces were the size of cut-off 6" X 12" beam ends. I salvaged perhaps eight or ten varyingly-sized pieces and took them back to "The Dudes". Some were brought back to California and planted up. Most came back with new growth. I planted one in my yard last spring, which quickly grew into a healthy plant with two heads about 18" in diameter, which is about as large as the heads on this species will get. I expect that the plant will flower this spring, which is a lovely sight to behold, with angelic white flowers rising in a four-foot tower above the sky-blue heads. I saw perhaps ten other ground-hugging species on that trip, most of which have the same massive below-ground woody water-storage structures.

So to get back to the point I was trying to make, it is not easy to grow these plants from seed. It takes a long time, and they are not so easy to maintain. They are not easy to find, especially in California (where they are not very well known or understood), and always seem to command a premium price, which they are probably worth. Yucca rostrata, and several other species, are more readily available in Arizona and Texas from the big wholesale nurseries that grow them en-masse with high heat units. Specimen plants of many of these are never cheap, so expect to pay dearly for well-grown plants with some trunkage.

I can readily remember, about thirty years ago when I was out a lot on the road doing retail nursery "route sales", seeing trucks from Texas showing up at the retail nurseries in Los Angeles with Yucca rostrata "logs" up to about eight or more feet long. Most of the roots were gone and the chaff leaves on the trunks had been shaved to about an inch long. Unfortunately, most of these plants were most-likely doomed due to massive root and rhizome loss. There were literally hundreds, if not thousands, of them to be seen around town potted-up in nurseries and being sold for around a hundred dollars or so a trunk-foot. They sold well and fast, as they are quite striking and unique, but the plants that didn't sell right away generally languished and died in the nurseries. So basically, people were buying a dried flower type of plant. I never saw a repeat of this performance since then. One can imagine the wholesale slaughter in Texas, where greedy landowners were likely more than happy to sell these useless "cactus" to city-slickers who probably offered them ten dollars apiece.

I would be highly skeptical of Yucca rostrata grown from cuttings; I doubt if they would ever re-establish well, especially when far-removed from their extreme Southern Texas & Northern Mexico habitat. Better to cough up the dough and buy the nicest one you can find. A well-grown fifteen-gallon with a large, healthy sky-blue head would be fine for anyone under forty years old. Old codgers like me would be well-advised to get one with at least four feet of trunk, if large ultimate size is what you are after.

Plants like the ones in Azuleja's photo above are what you should be after.

The Monger

[MikeyDude]

Yuccas are expensive here in central Texas but if you shop around and catch the nursery man with too many on hand he might be able to reduce his cost a little.

Below is a pic of a 4 1/2 ' -5' Yuccca thompsoniana I planted a year ago and was priced at $175 but the nursery had a bunch so he offered it for half price. It really took off growing within 6 months after I put it in the ground and had a big growth spurt. I watered it well during the hot summer months to promote growth.

Behind it are two Yucca rostrata 'Saphire Blue' that I purchased for 30$ each in a 5 gal size. These guys really grow fast when planted in the ground and regularly watered and fertilized with an organic type variety. I believe these doubled in size in a year and a half. However, these yuccas have many years to grow before they get a trunk and obtain that majestic look.


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Below, the 'Monger' is assessing the seeds on this yucca on our trip to west Texas (these east of El Paso) which are ripe for collecting. I believe these are Yucca elata.

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Later we head down to Big Bend and visit these mind blowing yuccas:

[Agavemonger]

The plants in the two photos directly above represent typical habitat at the northern end of the range of Yucca rostrata in far Southern Texas (Southwest Big Bend National Park). In IMG-2256 you can see a few other Yucca rostrata plants in the background, including one with a mature scape loaded with ripe seed. Even though this is the far end of their range, the plants are exceptionally healthy and appear to be reproducing very successfully. We saw a few that were 8' or so in height, and quite a few were setting heavy seed. Most, if not all, of the Yucca rostrata plants in this area were single headed plants, and all were perfectly sky blue.

The immediate area was a virtual botanical wonderland, just alive with incredible plants. No photos seem to do it justice at all; there is just something about being there in person and walking through a natural garden of this caliber. There were hundreds of perfect Yucca rostrata interspersed regularly amongst their much larger giant cousins Yucca faxoniana and Yucca torreyi. Many beautiful cacti, such as mature Opuntia rufida, Opuntia macrocentra, and Echinocactus horizonthalonius are liberally salted here and there amongst perfect Dasylirion leucophylum and a smattering of Agave.

When returning to California a week or so later, I stopped at a rest stop on the freeway that had been built in an area where Yucca thompsoniana, a related species, held sway. Although often thought of as a kind of "Raggedy Ann" version of Yucca rostrata, Yucca thompsoniana can be exceptionally beautiful when growing well. The head-high plants I saw at the rest stop looked for all the world as if they had been installed there by a landscaper, but the fact that the plants continued off onto and over the rolling hills in the distance, and were also present on the bluffs above road cuts for several more miles down the freeway, proved that these were habitat plants. Most of the larger plants had multiple heads of blueish-green leaves, and were setting large amounts of seed. Many of these were absolutely magnificent specimens, at least as pretty as any Yucca rostrata.

I was also particularly impressed with the terrestrial Yuccas commonly seen in the "Hill Country" of Central Texas. Yucca palida, Yucca reverchonii, Yucca constricta, and Yucca rupicola are just a few of the representatives of mid-western Yucca species that are both beautiful and exceptionally tough, with regular and magnificent flowering spectacles to boot. These plants make superb drought-tolerant landscaping candidates for a broad spectrum of applications. They will mostly survive all but exceptionally low temperatures.

The Monger

[toditd]

I was also particularly impressed with the terrestrial Yuccas commonly seen in the "Hill Country" of Central Texas.

Pardon my yucca ignorance, but what is meant by the term "terrestrial yucca"? I've seen this term thrown around a few times and I when I see it I think, "Aren't all yuccas terrestrial?" I think of "terrestrial" as meaning growing in soil. To date, I have never met a yucca that does not grow in soil. So, why the adjective "terrestrial"? Are there epiphytic yuccas? I must be missing something here. Please enlighten me!

[Gee.S]

I believe he uses the term as sorta the opposite of arborescent. So, ground huggers.

[toditd]

Thanks, I stand enlightened. I hadn't considered terrestrial/arborescent. I briefly considered terrestrial/extraterrestrial, but that's stretching things a bit too far.

[abborean]

maybe recumbent?

[Agavemonger]

When discussing the "ground-hugging" Yuccas, finding the correct botanical terminology can be difficult. Although the term acaulescent might be closest to the correct term, many of these plants can occasionally have short trunks up to perhaps two or three feet in height with great age. The plants sometimes become recumbent, but that is generally seen in very old heads that are falling over just before they die. The term caespitose can perhaps be more correct in describing some species, but this is more a term used to describe a clumping behavior with offsets arising from a central stem, which does not generally apply quite correctly to many of these Yucca species. Rhizomatous seems to be a more descriptive term, but sometimes doesn't seem to apply correctly either.

When I first encountered the species Yucca cernua in far Eastern Texas, I was quite taken aback by the beautiful blue rosettes of these plants growing long straight leaves up to about three feet high just on the edge of the forest next to a highway. None of the plants had any perceptible stem to speak of, and the large heads seemed to whither away after flowering. This species appeared to be on the very edge of survival, with very few seedlings apparent. They didn't seem to want to penetrate further than a few meters into the shady forest; they stuck close to the cleared areas just at the edge of the forest up to the fence along the highway. As I scouted the area, I noticed that a lot of little plants were growing nearer to the highway in a maintained "mow strip" perhaps fifty feet wide on both sides of the highway. They were obviously being periodically mowed to the ground. But they seemed determined to colonize this area, and there were stout little "seedling" plants coming up all through the mowed area. There were so many coming up that I decided I would "salvage" one or two, as they were obviously destined to be continually butched by the State Highway Department during their periodic maintenance mowing episodes. I grabbed a small shovel I had in the back of the car and placed the blade about 8" away from the seedling. Stomping down on the blade of the shovel with a good deal of force, I was surprised that the shovel blade deflected and the handle flew out of my hand. Must have hit a rock. I tried again about a foot away to the other side of the plantlet, but this time the shovel stuck fast at just a couple of inches underground. I got a small hand trowel and after some minor work I was able to ascertain that the shovel blade was embedded in a good-sized chunk of wood, and the "seedling" was connected directly to this same massive piece of wood, the size of which was clearly designed to defeat my feeble attempts at salvaging a plant or two. The rhizome mat probably extended for a meter or two in all directions, and there were obviously many more mats salted throughout the highway border area. Who knows how old these individual mats were; they clearly pre-dated the highway itself, which certainly was there in some form or another for at least 75 years. The individual plants were somehow surviving the highway maintenance by replenishing the rhizome mat with just enough energy to outlast the periodic mowing episodes.

Many of these "ground-hugging" Yucca species have this rather unique type of growth, which can be quite surprising when first encountered. As the plants mature, they develop a type of underground rhizomatous growth stretching out in all directions from the plant that continually enlarges into a combination of fleshy, fibrous, eventually woody extensions that thicken up to about the width of your arm. These large rhizomes can grow next to each other or over the top of each other until they seem to almost weld themselves together into a large, virtually woody mass that can extend out perhaps five feet or more in mature, very old native clumps. Perhaps this mass might best be described as a "mat" of underground rhizomatous growth that can store vast amounts of reserves of energy and water for the plant when times are tough. If the above ground growth is eaten or otherwise damaged or destroyed, the plant will simply send up new growth from another section of rhizome. Some species will drop individual heads when they are done flowering and send up new heads several feet away. These massive "mats" can seem completely out-of-all-proportion to the tiny heads of a native Yucca species.

When growing seedlings of most Yucca species, it is important to understand the relationship of the above-ground plant to the development and ecology of it's massive underground structures, which can contain up to perhaps one thousand times the bio-mass of the above-ground greenery. The plants are quite vulnerable to drought until their underground "reservoirs" have had many years to develop. Growing these plants in pots can be quite problematic, due to the underground rhizomes need to "breathe" and "stretch out" during the long, slow course of their development. That is why these plants are generally much better off (and much faster) being grown in the ground vs. in pots.

Some of the species that develop this massive underground "mat" are Yucca pallida, Yucca cernua, Yucca constricta, Yucca reverchonii, Yucca rupicola, Yucca campestris, and to some extent, (the true)Yucca freemanii.


The Monger

[abborean]

you can add all of the eastern natives to your list Monger. Nice to read some yucca talk here!

[Agavemonger]

Yup; and the Eastern Yuccas make really strong, drought resistant landscaping candidates also, with a myriad of sports available in different forms, and many named variegates in cultivation.

The Monger

[toditd]

Wonderful post, Monger. Thanks for taking the time to write it. Great information.

After reading your posts in this thread, I just might be inspired to move my young Y. rostrata from pot to in-ground sooner rather than later.