Eliot Jenkins

Yucca in flower

Yucca sp.

Yucca · San Diego Botanic Garden · 7 March 2026

Yucca in flower

A mature yucca throwing up a single flower spike from the centre of the rosette, in the dry garden at San Diego. Yuccas are plants of the deserts and dry hills of the Americas, and the coastal scrub here is the western edge of their country.

Each yucca species is pollinated by its own dedicated moth, which deliberately packs pollen into the flower's stigma before laying an egg in the ovary, a relationship so exact that neither plant nor moth can generally use a substitute for the other. The caterpillars eat some of the seeds and leave the rest.

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