{"id":1070,"date":"2011-06-02T11:19:51","date_gmt":"2011-06-02T15:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/?p=1070"},"modified":"2011-06-08T11:25:37","modified_gmt":"2011-06-08T15:25:37","slug":"not-just-a-pretty-flower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/2011\/06\/not-just-a-pretty-flower\/","title":{"rendered":"Not just a pretty flower"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div id=\"attachment_18595\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/?attachment_id=18595\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-18595\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-18595\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/yucca-plant.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"yucca-plant\" width=\"300\" height=\"479\" class=\"size-full wp-image-18595\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-18595\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Flowering yuccas punctuate Chapel Hill Tire\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s landscaped corner in Carrboro. Photo by Ken Moore <\/p><\/div><br \/>\n<strong>By Ken Moore<br \/>\n<em>Flora Columnist<\/em><\/strong><br \/>\nNow that yuccas are very noticeable as they approach full flowering, I remember a camping trip of a few years ago. It was early spring out in the Southwest, and our campsite was nestled down in desert vegetation, including many of the locally common yucca. The site is memorable; those yuccas were blooming, and the ground was literally carpeted with fallen flowers.<br \/>\nWe quickly learned to carefully navigate in and around the campsite to avoid direct contact with the needle-pointed, spear-like foliage. A run-in with a leaf or two makes one appreciate the common name, Spanish bayonet.<br \/>\nI was in charge of hustling up the breakfast, and remembering that yucca flowers, as well as the buds and fruit, are edible, I thought I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d experiment. Having most of the desirable ingredients of primitive camping \u00e2\u20ac\u201colive oil, onions, garlic, peppers and eggs \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I thought I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d add some fresh yucca flowers, just to see how edible they might be. Not surprisingly, my camping mates were skeptical, but willing to trust me. The resulting omelet-like concoction was delicious (like anything that includes onions saut\u00c3\u00a9ed in olive oil). So, for our several days there, we enjoyed yucca flower omelets as well as yucca flower-enhanced pasta sauces.<\/p>\n<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve enjoyed watching a single yucca, <em>Yucca filamentosa<\/em>, just beyond my front porch, send up its giant asparagus-like stem of tightly clustered flower buds. Now the impressive flowering branch, a panicle, sporting buds and flowers, stands 7 feet tall above the basal rosette spear-like leaves.<br \/>\nMy single plant is not nearly as spectacular as those so obvious now above the retaining walls along the bypass around Carrboro. Those most likely are volunteers, having found their way there thanks to traveling animals that have eaten the fruit.<br \/>\nMore deliberate and quite engaging is the colorful ornamental Chapel Hill Tire landscape opposite the PTA Thrift Shop in Carrboro. Designed by Ginay Gregory of Beyond the Pail landscape design and consulting, that always-something-of-interest-to-see busy corner of our town now sports dramatic flowering stems of yucca \u00e2\u20ac\u201c in this case, a variegated leaved cultivar.<br \/>\nYuccas, like the onions and garlic in my camping concoction, are in the lily family, or at least they were until recently. Taxonomists are still working on new classifications within the former lily family. Meanwhile, take a closer look at a single yucca flower. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a perfect lily, characterized by three sepals (the outer set) and three petals (the inner set) appearing alike, thus called tepals. Inside the tepals you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll spot six stamens surrounding a smallish, egg-shaped, superior ovary \u00e2\u20ac\u201c superior because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s situated above the stamens and tepals. Those are some of the basic characteristics of the lily family, with which you may impress friends and neighbors.<br \/>\n<div id=\"attachment_18596\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/?attachment_id=18596\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-18596\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-18596\" src=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/yucca-flowers.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"yucca-flowers\" width=\"350\" height=\"467\" class=\"size-full wp-image-18596\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-18596\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Yucca flowers are characteristic of the lily family. Photo by Ken Moore<\/p><\/div><br \/>\nBy the way, just this past Memorial Day morning, I took advantage of my very own yucca flowers and, if I do say so myself, concocted a most delicious egg dish, including, of course, onions, garlic and olive oil.<br \/>\nDr. Jim Duke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Handbook of Edible Weeds describes other edible qualities of yucca. He also elaborates on the rich Native-American medicinal heritage of yucca root, including a root poultice used to prevent baldness. Well, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m way too late to try that remedy!<br \/>\n<em>Email Ken Moore at flora@carrborocitizen.com.<br \/>\n<\/em><br \/>\nFind previous Ken Moore Citizen columns at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\">The Annotated Flora<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Ken Moore Flora Columnist Now that yuccas are very noticeable as they approach full flowering, I remember a camping trip of a few years ago. It was early spring out in the Southwest, and our campsite was nestled down in desert vegetation, including many of the locally common yucca. The site is memorable; those [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,22],"tags":[791,792,790],"class_list":["post-1070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ken-moores-flora","category-summer","tag-spanish-bayonet","tag-yucca","tag-yucca-filamentosa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1070"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1074,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1070\/revisions\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/flora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}