What's in Bloom at The Ruth Bancroft Garden (May 2026)

Añadido: 2026-05-12

[00:00:12]Welcome to the May edition of What's in Bloom at the Ruth Bankraftoft Garden.

[00:00:16]Each month we prepare a what's in Bloom sheet featuring plants that are in bloom in that particular month. And now as we move into May and springtime, a lot of the yuckas are in bloom. An example is Yakano Mexicana here, named after the state of New Mexico where it occurs in nature. As you can see, it forms a large clump of many heads and as a result, there's lots of flower stock socks coming up. Makes a big show in the springtime. One of the things I really like about it is the way that there are tinges of pink and purple on the brack.

[00:00:49]So, it's not just plain white like a lot of yuckas, but it has all these subtle pastel colors in it. Yucka Neoxana.

[00:00:57]Yaka Neoxana is a stemless species, but that's not true of all yuckas. Some of them get to be huge. And an example is yakaifa that's towering over me. So, it is native to a large swath of eastern Mexico. And it can get even much larger than our specimen. Uh I saw one in northern Mitroan that had a trunk so big there was a door carved in it and you could go through the trunk out and come out the other side. So, that shows you how big it can get. Now, this is an unusual yucka, not only because of its huge size, but also because of the way that the flowers come out and then hang down. Most yuckas, the flowers go up.

[00:01:37]And so, you can see that here with these flower clusters that are arching out and then dangling at the tips. Yucka felifra.

[00:01:46]The yuckas are related to the agave. and they are part of a plant group that's all from the Americas including the hesper yuckas and hesperallos and berinaras and fcrayas.

[00:01:57]Well, another new world plant family uh that we have a lot of in the garden is the bromeilad family bromeilier.

[00:02:04]And the largest of all the bromeilads is puya raondi from the Andes. And so other ones that aren't quite so big include this one, Puya alpestrus from Chile. So uh whereas most puyas have narrow tubular flowers that are pollinated by hummingbirds, this one has a flower with a wide open face and to go with that these spurs uh that come off the inflloresence that serve as a bird perch so a bird can get access to the nectar and pollinate the flowers. So there is only a minority of the puyas that have this adaptation for perching birds with the floral branches and the wide open faces and puya alpestrus from Chile is one of them. Puya alpestrus puya ceruia variety ceruia is another puya and has a more typical puya flower a narrow tubular flower and uh this is it right here. It's got a very silvery leaf, sword-like silvery leaf with sharp teeth on it like most puyas do have and then these very narrow uh dark purplish blue flowers. Now, puya ceruia uh ceruia means blue, but the flowers are really more of a dark purple than they are of a blue uh but extraordinary when seen up close. They have a kind of a sheen to them and then as they dry they turn purple and twist which is a characteristic of a lot of puyas. Uh this one can form a very large patch in time with many inflloresences. Ours is more modest size and has only three flower stocks coming out of it. But you can see how silvery the leaves are and how striking those dark purple blue flowers are when seen up close. Puya ceruia variety ceruia. Puya Ceruia has a big distribution in Chile and has multiple varieties. So this is another of them. This is Puya Ceruia variety Montterana.

[00:04:02]So its rosettes are much smaller, leaves are narrower and not as silvery. Uh and its flower stocks are taller and the branch is more spaced out on the infllorescents.

[00:04:15]uh and the same though tubular purple black flowers but in this case they're even longer and uh because they're so spaced out they show up really well. So uh this plant takes up a lot of real estate. You can see how many uh feet across that is and how many stalks are coming out of it. So it makes a big display when it blooms every year with those amazing flowers. Puya ceruia variety montana. Puyas occur in many South American countries, but today we're featuring Chilean ones. And here is another puya venusta. So again, like we saw with Puya Ceruia Ceruia, this one has very silvery leaves. And here are the incredible influesences. So the stalk is pink, the uh bracks are uh kind of a pinkish, and then the flowers are this incredible saturated purple color.

[00:05:08]Just incredible flowers. So right now it has four inflloresences coming up out of the clump and as time grows on and the clump gets bigger it'll have even more.

[00:05:18]So uh this is a plant we got from uh a nursery called Annie's annual. So they had planted it and didn't realize how big it gets ultimately and it got too big so they asked us to come and dig it out and we did and we had to divide it into three because it was so large and this is onethird of it. But we're so happy that it took and it's doing so well in setting up these incredible flowers. Puya venusta. Well, that brings us to the close of our May edition of What's in Bloom. So, by all means, come to the garden and see these plants for yourselves if you're able to do so. And if you're farther away and can't, well, then we have this video to entertain you. The Ruth Bankraftoft Garden.