Chaparral Yucca, Yucca whipplei, San Diego, California
1,881 views · Published 25 July 2012 · 2:35 · Indexed 20 September 2026
Channel: Melvin Wei · 2012 · Science & Technology
If you've ever looked outside your car windows on the way to Las Vegas from Southern California on the I-15 freeway, you've probably seen the blooming or dead inflorescences of what looks to be a agave or yucca plant out in the foothills or chaparral. This is what we were looking at for all these years! It's colloquial name is chaparral yucca, but it is also called our Lord's candle, Quixote yucca (Don Quixote?), Spanish bayonet (just like Shaw's agave, everything apparently looked like a conquistador's bayonet hundreds of years ago), common yucca, and foothill yucca. The last two names are just as valid as chaparral yucca in my opinion. There are thousands upon thousands of these in the landscape in any given region around here, and this is one of the most easily recognizable and memorable plants from a distance. Its leaves grow up to 1.25 m long, while the inflorescence gets up to 3 m tall. Chaparral yucca has an exclusive pollinating relationship with the California yucca moth. The California yucca moth comes at night to pollinate the chaparral yucca flowers, laying a single egg in each ovary of the plant, which hatch later and feed on some of the seeds. This relationship between insect and plant is a textbook example of symbiosis.
