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Yucca

(Yucca filamentosa)

A book from 1873 called this plant Adam's Needle-and-Thread. Current books have dropped the thread, calling it only Adam's Needle. The original name referred to (I believe) the shape of the leaf, needle-like, and the loose filaments,threads, along the leaf margin. Why it was Adam's, and not Eve's, I have not a clue.

This is one of our two plants. It is part of a collection of plants chosen to illustrate the wide variety of leaves in the plant kingdom.

 

 

There are practical reasons a plant has a a certain type of leaf. It is not a fashion statement!

The flowers may be eaten in a salad!

The flower only has 3 petals, but the sepals look like petals
so you would think it had 6 petals.

This strange looking fruit may be eaten if you remove all the seeds.

It has 3 cells stuffed full of flattened seeds.

I wanted to show you a mature clump. As you tour New England you will notice the yucca planted around many old homes. Sometimes you will see it somewhere where there is no homestead left...everything is gone except the tough plants like yucca and lilac.

Study pointers:

• OK...what is a sepal? Use a dictionary, or a plant guide, or the internet, or a science book, a botany textbook
  
• OK...what is botany?
  
• Eating flowers in salads has become popular in the last 5 years. Find out more about it. Check the library for new cookbooks to find out what other flowers you can eat.
  
• Enter "edible flowers" into a search engine like Yahooligans to search the internet.
  
• Be a landscape historian. Plants go in and out of style. By looking at old paintings and photographs you can do a little detective work and find out who liked what and when!
  
• Look up candied violets.

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