This solitary aloe has thick gray-green leaves with wide teeth at the margins, it forms a single rosette that’s 2 feet in height and 4 feet in width.
Its branched inflorescence bears a chartreuse flowers that thickly tomentose and they almost appear to be white.
Ferocactus latispinus ‘Devil’s Tongue Barrel’
This species of barrel cactus is light green in color with reddish to white spines. If you look close enough you’ll see that the prominent spine is wide and flat and curved at the end. Ferocactus latispinus can grow 12 inches in height and 16 inches in width; it blooms in the late fall through mid-winter with purple, funnel-shaped flowers that are about 1.5 inches in width.
This medium-sized succulent plant forms stemless rosettes up to 2-3 feet in height and 2-3 feet in width. The leaves are 6-12 inches long with dark green to a bronzish-green color and have stringy white-colored filaments that curl away from the leaf edges. The flower stalk is up to 11.5 feet tall and is densely loaded with yellowish-green to dark purple flowers up to 2 inches long. Flowers appear in fall and winter.
Limited to the sandstones of the Isalo National Park, this small narrow-leaved, long stemmed aloe is from Madagascar.
The leaves are 11-19 inches in length, with pale brown teeth margins.
When exposed to full sun the leaves turn a pale red to salmon-pink, in the shade the leaves have a normal light green color.
Blooming period is in Fall with inflorescence being 11-20 inches tall; racemes are cylindrical.
Aloe isaloensis is great drought tolerant plant; it’s suitable for rock gardens, xeriscape and container gardens.
Desert Spoon or in spanish known as Sotol is an evergreen succulent that forms a large rosette of blue-gray leaves that are 3-4 foot long, narrow and serrated along the edges. This long-lived succulent is native to the Chihuahuan desert in Mexico. The rosettes can be 3-5 feet in height and 4-6 feet in width; once mature, this succulent blooms a pole-like flower spike that can reach 10-15 high.
The Puebloans used the sotol fiber to make sandals, baskets, ropes, mats, and many other items which was highly important to the Pueblo peoples of the basket maker culture.
The North American indigenous peoples used the central part of the plant which was baked then dried and pounded into a powder and then mixed water and made into cakes. The flowering stems were roasted, boiled or eaten raw.
800 years ago the Rarámuri peoples of Chihuahua fermented Sotol into a beer-like beverage; in the 16th century, Spanish colonists introduced European distillation techniques to produce a spirit called Sotol and is now beginning to achieve international recognition like mezcal and tequila.
