(Click on the blog title above to be directed to my blog site for a better experience and a chance to see the featured image, which is deleted from the email versions of this blog.)
Soaptree yucca (Yucca elata) is one of the crown jewels of the Chihuahuan Desert Ecoregion – a tall, stately, easily recognized species that is common in the Middle San Pedro Valley. Its distinctive plume of beautiful white flowers can be seen by the naked eye at distances upwards of a mile away. Soaptree plants can live for more than three decades and attain heights exceeding 15 feet. This is one of the few tall flowering plants in North American deserts that does not strike up a relationship with high-altitude pollinators like birds, bats, hawk moths, or bees. Soaptrees, like many other yuccas native to the West, are pollinated exclusively by only a few genera of specialized, small moths: particularly by insects known as yucca moths, (Tegeticula yuccasela or T. maculata).
The close relationship that this yucca has with its pollinating moths has been going on for millennia. The moths are white in color and rather small, with wingspans around an inch in width. After mating, yucca moths fly to the flowers, where they gather pollen. The pollen is carefully packed into specialized depressions on the surface of the flower ovaries. Without this stimulus, the yuccas cannot produce seeds. In return, the moths’ larvae feed on yucca seeds in the developing seed capsules.
This yucca is among the few desert plants that can thrive in a sand dune environment, but they do very well in other habitats as well, such as the lower elevation uplands in this valley. Unlike other yuccas, Yucca elata forms vertical rhizomes that plunge downward to depths of five feet, then grow out laterally to sprout new plants. Plant rhizomes usually grow horizontally, but this yucca’s departure from that rule enables the plants to do well in hot, dry environs.
Yuccas have a myriad of ethnobotanical aspects, for they were put to many uses by most, if not all native tribes living within the range of these pants. Yucca roots are rich in saponins, which were extracted to make effective soaps and shampoos. Many parts of the pants were consumed as food, including the flower buds, fresh flowers (eaten raw or cooked), and the flower stalks. Tough fibers from the long, linear leaves were cleverly utilized to make twine, rope, footwear, and textiles.
