Yucca gloriosa (moundlily yucca)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Yucca gloriosa, photographed by Arnim Littek — fig. a Arnim Littek, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-10 / obs. 205981095

Yucca gloriosa, photographed by Ryan Watson — fig. c Ryan Watson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 177868189

Yucca gloriosa, photographed by Joe Dillon — fig. d Joe Dillon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 175979632

Yucca gloriosa, photographed by Hill Craddock — fig. e Hill Craddock, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173297948

Yucca gloriosa, photographed by Jeremy Gilmore — fig. g Jeremy Gilmore, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 153112794

Yucca gloriosa, photographed by Bobby McCabe — fig. h Bobby McCabe, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 141433285

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 7 botanical countries

Native distribution of Yucca gloriosa, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Alabama	ALA	NORTHERN AMERICA
Florida	FLA
Georgia	GEO
Louisiana	LOU
Mississippi	MSI
North Carolina	NCA
South Carolina	SCA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 133 in flower of 248 examined

21%

30%

42%

70%

57%

53%

62%

33%

56%

81%

76%

47%

Proportion of examined Yucca gloriosa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	6	28	21%	10% to 40%
Feb	6	20	30%	15% to 52%
Mar	10	24	42%	24% to 61%
Apr	21	30	70%	52% to 83%
May	12	21	57%	37% to 76%
Jun	8	15	53%	30% to 75%
Jul	8	13	62%	36% to 82%
Aug	4	12	33%	14% to 61%
Sep	9	16	56%	33% to 77%
Oct	22	27	81%	63% to 92%
Nov	19	25	76%	57% to 89%
Dec	8	17	47%	26% to 69%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Yucca gloriosa observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 133 of 248 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,556 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	0.5 °C	6.5 °C	11.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.6 °C	26.0 °C	33.5 °C
Annual rainfall	595 mm	1,016 mm	1,599 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	43 mm	159 mm	289 mm

It is found where winters are cool but frost is light or absent. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,556 research-grade observations of Yucca gloriosa that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 81 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Dracaena ensifolia Haw.
Yucca acuminata Sweet
Yucca acutifolia Truff.
Yucca angustifolia Carrière
Yucca boerhaavii Baker
Yucca ellacombei Baker
Yucca ensifolia Groenl.
Yucca eylesii Baker
Yucca falcata var. semicylindrica (Baker) Baker
Yucca flexilis Carrière
Yucca flexilis f. boerhaavii (Baker) Trel.
Yucca flexilis f. ensifolia (Groenl.) Baker
Yucca flexilis f. ensifolia (Groenland) Voss
Yucca flexilis f. peacockii (Baker) Trel.
Yucca flexilis f. semicylindrica (Baker) Baker
Yucca flexilis f. tortulata (Baker) Trel.
Yucca flexilis var. boerhaavii (Baker) Trel.
Yucca flexilis var. ensifolia (Groenl.) Baker
Yucca flexilis var. hildrethii Trel.
Yucca flexilis var. patens (André) Trel.
Yucca flexilis var. peacockii (Baker) Trel.
Yucca flexilis var. tortulata (Baker) Trel.
Yucca gloriosa f. acuminata (Sweet) Voss
Yucca gloriosa f. genuina Engelm.

and 57 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.