Yucca rupicolaScheele

Twisted-leaf Yucca

WFO wfo-0000752219 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Yucca rupicola, photographed by Bonnie Semmling
fig. a Bonnie Semmling, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205218798

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 60 observations

Flowering observations of Yucca rupicola by month
MonthObservations
Jan0
Feb0
Mar1
Apr11
May42
Jun5
Jul1
Aug0
Sep0
Oct0
Nov0
Dec0

Peak flowering in May, from 60 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 4 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.

  • Yucca lutescens Carrière
  • Yucca rupicola var. tortifolia Engelm.
  • Yucca tortifolia Lindh. ex Torr.
  • Yucca tortilis Carrière

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

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