Plant Wiki

The open plant encyclopedia

Know any plant.
Grow it well.

Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.

  • 13,000+plants with full pages
  • 365,000+plant species worldwide
  • 220+countries covered

Common in

See all

The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.

What do you want to do?

Popular plants

Browse all plants

See them in 3D

All plants in 3D

Browse plants

Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.

Plant Wiki › Browse plants

Great Desert Spoon

Dasylirion acrotrichum

Also called Green Sotol

Great Desert Spoon
Photo: Unknown author, CC BY-SA 3.0

A slow-growing desert shrub from northern and central Mexico that forms a rosette of stiff, grasslike, spoon-shaped leaves and sends up a tall flower spike in midsummer. It needs full sun, excellent drainage and very little water once established.

Family
Asparagaceae (Asparagus family)
Grows as
Shrub
Light
Full sun
Water
Water deeply but infrequently, letting the soil dry out completely between waterings; reduce further in winter.
Soil
Fast-draining sandy or gritty mix, cactus-style or amended with grit or pumice.
Temperature
Comfortable at about 15–35 °C; hardy to about −7 °C (20 °F), so protect from prolonged hard frost.
How easy
Easy
Native range
Mexico
Climate
desert or dry shrubland

About

Dasylirion acrotrichum, the great desert spoon and green sotol (also, spoon yucca, though not a true Yucca), is a plant native to the Chihuahuan Desert and other xeric habitats in northern and central Mexico.

How to grow it

The drought-tolerant and dramatic plant is cultivated by nurseries for use in personal gardens and larger xeriscape landscape projects in the Southwestern United States and California. Dasylirion acrotrichum is hardy to 20 °F (−7 °C)

Other Dasylirion plants

Mexican Grass Tree · Texas sotol · Common sotol · Sotols

Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Dasylirion acrotrichum by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.

The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.

Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.

Credits & terms

Identify a plant

Point at a leaf or flower and snap. One plant in frame works best.

Your photo
Starting camera…