A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
yucca
A yucca is a desert plant with a rosette or a trunk carrying stiff sword-shaped leaves ending in a hard point, and a tall stalk of waxy cream bell-flowers. Around fifty species grow across the Americas, from ground-level rosettes to the branched tree of the Mojave. The leaves give fiber, the roots give soap, the flowers and fruit are eaten, and the dried stalk works as a fire drill.
Etymology
The name came into English through Spanish from Taíno, a language of the Caribbean, and it was originally the word for cassava. It was applied to this entirely unrelated plant by mistake in the sixteenth century and never corrected, so the standard name for an American desert plant is a Caribbean word for a tropical root crop.
Notes
Yuccas and yucca moths cannot live without each other. The moth deliberately collects pollen, carries it to another flower, packs it into the stigma, and then lays eggs in the ovary so the larvae can eat some of the developing seeds. No other insect pollinates a yucca and the moth larvae eat nothing else; the moth is one of the few insects known to pollinate on purpose rather than incidentally.