I saw red yucca in bud or flower all over the Dallas Fort Worth area of Texas in April. A handsome plant, it was easy to learn to recognize it.
Red yucca's scientific name is Hesperaloe parviflora. Hesperaloe is a combination of hesperus which means western (as in "of the evening star in the west") in Latin and aloe the plant. Aloes, such as the famous Aloe vera, are Eurasian plants, while this plant is native to the New World, so Hesperaloe is "western aloe." It is in the agave subfamily of the asparagus family Asparagaceae. The species epithet parviflora means "with small flowers." Hesperaloe is neither a yucca (genus Yucca) nor aloe (genus Aloe) though closely related to both, so red yucca is also called false yucca, as well as coral yucca, hummingbird yucca, redflower false yucca, and more.
I'm inclined to say hes-per-AL-o-e, but that is working with the Latin name. In English, aloe is pronounced alo, so the UTGarden site rhymes it with desperado, hes-per-A-lo, which makes a fun association.
It has thin narrow leaves with curling fibers along edges which form a clump two to three feet high. It is quite drought-tolerant.
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| red yucca leaves |
In spring, the plant sends up flower stalks to about five feet. The flowers are a striking red to coral and attract hummingbirds and butterflies. Flowers open about dawn and close about noon.
I can find no records of insects that use it as a host plant but that probably mainly from lack of study. Likewise, a rare plant of a few counties in Texas does not appear in the Native American ethnobotanical works available to me, but its leaves almost certainly were used as fiber in Texas or Mexico. Despite being in cultivation for more than 100 years, surprisingly little is known about the plant.
Please take a look at my books. For those who don't read the internet or prefer books I gathered posts together into actual books, for example:
New book coming later this year: Plants You Meet Everywhere. The stories of really cosmopolitan plants such as marigolds, bougainvillea and cheatgrass.
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| red yucca, Hesperaloe parviflora |
Red yucca's native range reaches into central and western Texas from Mexico, and in Texas, it is rare with only scattered, small populations, so it is considered at risk of regional extinction by Texas conservationists.
Yet I saw it growing all over Dallas and Fort Worth. Thus, this plant is at risk of going extinct in nature but has large numbers of plants in cultivation. This will likely be the fate of a lot of pretty wildflowers: the places that they grow naturally shrink in the face of development but humans propagate them and plant lots of them. Their numbers may be higher than before settlement, due to their presence in so many gardens.
This brings up questions we rarely ask about plants: is there some benefit to being wild? how much does growing in a garden change wild plants and how fast? Won't having lots more red yucca plants protect them from extinction better than if we didn't grow lots of red yucca?
DeLong-Anaya states that the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center generally does not promote rare plants because that demand leads to people digging up wild plants, which are needed to maintain small wild populations. But once a rare species is growing well for nurseries and gardeners and is reliably propagated, especially by seed, surely being easily obtained will reduce the incentive to raid wild populations.
I think this grades into the question of "how is a garden flower different from a wildflower?" I don't think we know the answer to that yet, but raising American wildflowers for gardens is going to give us some answers.
Also visible in central Texas were red yucca plants with yellow flowers. In this case, a mutant plant with yellow flowers was observed in nature and brought into cultivation for gardeners. These were really attractive as well.
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| yellow red yucca, Hesperaloe parviflora |
Having a "naturally occuring" yellow-flowered red yucca sounds very "natural." However, there are many steps--many years--between finding a plant with yellow flowers in a West Texas prairie and providing yellow-flowered plants for sale. If, as is likely, the yellow form is a homozygous recessive with two alleles (genes) for "not-red" flowers where other plants have one or both for "red", then to have plants for the yellow form to cross with (that more plants could be produced by seed, not just by cloning) one would cross yellow with red and plant out the seeds. Likely these would all have red flowers, because red is dominant genetically, and so another cross is needed, between them (or with them to the parent plant), gathering seeds and growing up the plants until they flower and show the flower color. Then you can select a group of all homozygous recessive yellow flowered plants, which will breed true, all their progeny yellow-flowered. From there more and more plants must be grown, so that lots of nurseries and garden stores each can have several plants to offer. Unusual or typical, no plant can be widely available for sale without production nurseries working on them.
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| red yucca in bud |
Red yucca is a very successful wildflower story, with people embracing this uncommon native plant and increasing its numbers in regions where it likely grew before settlement, and beyond.
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| red yucca, Hesperaloe parviflora |
They are very beautiful.
Comments and corrections welcome.
References
DeLong-Amaya, A. 2025. The Texas Native Plant Primer. Timber Press. Portland Oregon.
Hochstatter, F. 2009. The genus Hesperaloe (Agavaceae). Cactus World 27 (2): 2009-1. Online at agavaceae.com link
Pellmyr, O. and E. J. Augenstein. 1997. Pollination ecology of Hesperaloe parviflora. The Southwestern Naturalist 42 (2): 182-7.
Turner, B. L. and M. W. Turner. 2002. Natural populations of Hesperaloe (Agavaceae) in Texas. Lundellia, 2002(5):34-43. https://doi.org/10.25224/1097-993X-5.1.34. link
UTGardens, Knoxville. 2020. Say howdy to this plant from the wild West. UT Gardens. State Botanical Garden of Tennessee. link
NoCo Notables, Stories of Common Plants of the Colorado Front Range, Plants have cool stories, about their interactions with other plants and animals and with humans. Go beyond just having a name for the plant, learn more about it. Available from Amazon link or from me.
And
Look Twice, containing stories of plants from the unique environments found in western Nebraska and eastern Colorado, available from Amazon link or from me.
New book coming later this year: Plants You Meet Everywhere. The stories of really cosmopolitan plants such as marigolds, bougainvillea and cheatgrass.
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