Yucca nana is a beautiful, dwarf yucca that grows in eastern Utah and western Colorado on the sandstone substrates and in pinon-juniper forests of the Colorado Plateau. Mature rosettes are not more than around a foot in diameter (30 cm) and many are smaller than that. The common name is dwarf yucca, or doll-house yucca.
Often single but also forming small clumps, Yucca nana is one of the loveliest of the yucca clan and it’s surely among the smallest. (The specific epithet means “small” or “miniature”.) There is some dispute about whether this plant can be justified to be a separate species, or whether it’s a subspecies of the slightly larger Yucca harrimaniae. Either way, there’s no doubt that this compact and cold-tolerant plant would be a wonderful addition to various rock gardens and succulent collections for enthusiasts. Plus the filamentous leaves are extra decorative in pots or confined spaces!
I have successfully grown Yucca nana here in the fortuitously-named town of Yucca, Arizona, which is a much hotter climate than where these grow in the wild. Unfortunately the lone plant I had did die after about 10 years, but that’s not a bad run at all! The seed pods were not yet ripe on this individual so there was no point in taking some seeds to try reestablishing a new one in my gardens again.
Habitat of Yucca nana in southeastern Utah.
The distant La Sal Mountains rise behind the eroded sandstone canyons of southeastern Utah.
Yucca nana tends to grow upon shallow pockets of soil in between areas of slickrock, interspersed with short forests of Utah and one-seed junipers (Juniperus utahensis, J. monosperma) and pinon pines (Pinus edulis).
World-class Utah scenery that would be a National Park almost anywhere else, but is “just another example” of our wonderful publicly-administered Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in the Intermountain West.
A living community of organisms makes up this scene of red sand stabilized by what is termed cryptobiotic soil, or cryptobiotic crust. Comprised of a variety of species of lichens, fungi, bacteria, and algae among other items, cryptobiotic soil is important to the high desert environment for providing the ecological services of retarding erosion, retaining water, fixing nitrogen, and creating a seed bed for new seedlings of vascular plant species. Yucca nana seedlings establish themselves in cryptobiotic crust, and grow in the more stable and nutrient-rich sands that lie under them.
The reason that many of us working in the western United States don’t consider this to be a separate species nor even a subspecies under Y. harrimaniae is because seeds from the plants thought to be dwarf/small-sized plants will in horticulture become indistinguishable from Y. harrimaniae (var. harrimaniae if one recognizes subtaxa) and this has been observed in growing experiments multiple times. It seems to be more of a response to soil or elevation or is simply a part of its overall variation but not a genetic trait that is distinguishable from the whole. The tall flowering stalks are also not unique/unusual for the species. It simply has leaves that are highly variable in terms of their length.
Thanks for the clarification. I’ve never tried growing from seed to observe the results, but this makes sense.
This was helpful, also, Jan Emming, as your “Kitchen Desert Night Lizard” published some eight years agone was as well. Sincerely, Shaun St. Clair { a. D. 2023 – x – 26 @ ~9:35 p. m. ( PDT ) s. j. s. }