Yucca,
Spanish Bayonet
Yucca filamentosa
Family Liliaceae

Characteristics:
* Flowers greenish-white, bell-like, growing on a woody central stalk.
* Leaves spiky, rigid, in a rosette, with loose threads on the margins, 1" wide.
* Height:

Natural History:
* Flowers June - September.
* Habitat: Sandy soils, sterile ground, pine barrens, dunes.
* Range: Coastal plain from New Jersey south, escaped northward.
* Native.

Connections!
* Yucca plants have been put to many uses by the Indians of the southern United States. They made rope and fishing lines, wove baskets, and sewed garments using the fibrous filaments in the leaves. Yucca flowers were eaten, and a substance called saponin in the roots was used as soap and to treat rheumatism.

* "Here is a kind of grasse in the countrey uppon the blades whereof there groweth very good silke in forme of a thin glittering skin to bee stript off."
-Thomas Herriot, reporting from Virginia in 1590