Walkaways Part 19

Haven't done one of these posts in a long time, because for the most part, I don't plant-shop anymore. Consequently, this list is 1) short, and 2) old. But I figure I should do something with these photos if I'm going to, and they're all interesting to some degree or another, so here we are.

The "most part" link above goes to a post about buying a Huernia and Mangave at Reha's Greenhouses in Wellman, IA on April 7; they also had a noteworthy Gasteria, G. minima variegata:

Why didn't I buy it, too? I don't know. I like Gasterias, but I haven't had great luck with them overall. (Though the seedlings are still doing okay, thanks for asking.) I think it's mostly an overwatering issue.

The other two plants are unusual color/size versions of perfectly ordinary plants, witnessed at Frontier Garden Center (Cedar Rapids, IA) on May 16; unfortunately, Frontier's greenhouse and the time of day combined to turn all the photos orange. I have attempted to correct for this, but I wasn't wholly successful.

The first plant was, I think, a new variety of Dracaena reflexa, though it's possible that it's Dracaena deremensis, and it hardly matters since D. deremensis is officially D. fragrans, so I think we should just all be happy that it's still classifiable as a Dracaena and make a jump to the next paragraph before this one explodes into a fireball --

Whatever species it is, I haven't seen this variety before, and the tag didn't give a variety name. The leaves were shorter than D. deremensis 'Warneckei,' which it otherwise resembles, but not quite as short as D. reflexa leaves usually are, and I've never seen a D. reflexa with this coloration.

I didn't even recognize the last one at first, but I figured it out as soon as I happened to brush along the side of a leaf -- it's my good friend Yucca guatemalensis. The biggest one I have ever seen, to boot. (My best guess from memory and the photo is that it was about 4 feet / 1.2 m in diameter, maybe a little wider near the top.)

I'm not 100% sure that it's a variety I haven't seen before -- I do have a streaky gray cultivar here, the oldest of my plant acquisitions, but the color on the plant at Frontier was a lot more consistent than my plants, with a single, mostly uniform light stripe taking up the middle 50% or so of the leaf. At one time, I would have bought this without blinking an eye (it was even fairly cheap -- I can't read the tag from the photo, but I think it was somewhere between $30 and $40), but it was so huge, and I know I don't have room for a plant this size, so I had to leave it.