Down to Earth: The Herb Yucca

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In the last year of my father’s life, he lost much of the control he had always exercised over the things around him. He lost his ability to drive, to garden, and to work in the yard. He gave up growing tomatoes and corn. He quit cultivating the long row of rhubarb in the garden and let the raspberry patch dwindle to just a few plants. The sage my mother had grown from seed died from neglect, and the old spearmint bed fell prey to the lawn mower. All he could do was totter around the property that had always been his domain, first with the aid of a cane and later with a walker.

I watched as the scope of his life got smaller. A trip to the mailbox became a major event. The lawn was an intimidating prairie wilderness, the lawn mower as large as a bulldozer. As his world changed, Dad’s need to control something, anything, finally led him to focus on a yucca, or soapweed (Yucca glauca), that I had planted next to the garage soon after the building was completed in the 1950s. Granted, it wasn’t a very good spot for a yucca: if you strayed off the narrow path that ran between the garage and the house, you risked being stabbed by the spiny clump’s leaves.

Although he had largely ignored the tough herb during its thirty-five-year tenure on his property, my dad never liked the plant. But because my mom was especially fond of the showy white, bell-shaped blooms and often served them in salads, I use to try to keep the skin-piercing, pointed leaves trimmed, and I frequently told Dad about yucca’s many uses in the hope of inspiring his appreciation for the plant.

I explained how Native Americans used the fibers from the leaves of the plant, which grows wild throughout central Missouri and much of the Midwest, South, and Southwest, to weave cloth. I told him how more than 8 million pounds of burlap bags were made from the plant fibers during World War I, when there was a shortage of jute. I told him about seeing yucca roots in the grocery store and that people still eat the root like a vegetable, as they did in earlier days. I reminded him that his own grandparents had used the roots as a natural soap for washing their clothes as well as poulticing them on skin inflammations, sprains, and cuts.