Yucca filifera tree yucca

Yucca filifera in front of the Anderson Collection. Sairus Patel, 9 May 2023

Yucca filifera in front of the Anderson Collection. Sairus Patel, 24 May 2018

Unrivaled in California is our collection of majestic tree yuccas. Their hugely swollen bases and rosettes of sword-shaped leaves are impressive at any time of year. But to behold the clusters of creamy white flowers – many over a yard long – thickly drooping from their crowns is to see these relicts from the pre-University years in their resplendent glory.

The pendant clusters of flowers are the clearest distinction from the more familiar Joshua tree (Y. brevifolia), whose inflorescences stand upright. Both species branch – unusual for monocots, including palms – though Y. filifera does so more quickly in nature than in cultivation. Filaments peeling off from leaf margins (hence filifera) further distinguish it from Y. brevifolia.

In the early 1880s, landscape gardener Rudolph Ulrich traveled on collecting expeditions to Arizona Territory and Mexico while designing and planting the Arizona Garden. The garden lay adjacent to the site of a planned mansion for Leland and Jane Stanford. After their son’s death, those plans were abandoned, and the site was instead used for the family mausoleum. Near the garden’s center, a massive two-trunked specimen lost one of its trunks in 2022. Another at the southern edge of the garden has a pronounced, lopsided crown, perhaps in response to an oak that has since been removed.

Most imposing of all is the ancient specimen in front of the Anderson Collection, which in 2023 was christened national champion for size, for its species, by the California Big Tree Registry. Preserved during construction of that building in 2013, it received the rare distinction of its own interpretive sign. Now towering to a height of more than 40 feet, it was very likely transplanted in the late 1890s from the nearby Arizona Garden, soon after completion of the north extension to the Stanford museum – part of Jane Stanford’s building out of her museum quadrangle, most of which was later removed. The striking cavity at its base, with fire-charred walls, has been present since at least the 1960s. Mechanical damage may have initiated it; as for the fire, one recalls that smoking was far more common on campus in earlier decades.

Another enormous specimen – likewise bearing a dramatically lopsided crown – once grew on the grounds of Cedro Cottage near San Francisquito Creek, now the site of Oak Knoll Elementary School, Menlo Park. The cottage, set in richly elaborate gardens, was home to one of Jane Stanford’s brothers and later to various early faculty and staff. There, Mrs. Stanford and little Leland had spent many happy hours at the bench of their favorite tree, a giant oak festooned with a climbing rose. A 1985 photograph shows the yucca to have been nine feet across at the base and more than 35 feet tall. As with the museum specimen, it was likely transplanted from the Arizona Garden at Mrs. Stanford’s direction. Redesign of the school’s track area in 2011–2012 led to its removal.

Yucca filifera is native to the dry eastern and southern reaches of the Chihuahuan Desert and its margins, where it may form extensive forests and thrives in heat; its flowers are pollinated by a specialized yucca moth (Tegeticula sp.). Its sweet fruits, dátiles – absent here, since we lack the moth – are eaten fresh or dried and sometimes fermented, while hollow trunks have been used as beehives. At Stanford it has proved eminently suited to local conditions; few comparable specimens exist elsewhere in the state. One hopes that more will be planted, for the enjoyment of the Stanford community in the century to come.

Name derivation: Yucca – Haitian: yuca, or manihot, because young inflorescences sometimes roasted for food; filifera – (leaves) composed of or bearing thread-like structures.