Aloe speciosa’s bold form and showy flowers are irresistible
Visitors to the Ruth Bancroft Garden during the winter months are often amazed at the array of aloes in flower at this time of year, and many of these winter bloomers come from South Africa. While some are stemless, others develop a trunk and become dramatic “exclamation points” in the garden, calling attention to themselves like living sculptures. The combination of the bold form of these plants and their showy flowers is irresistible.
One such species is Aloe speciosa, native to the southern part of the country. The name “Tilt-head Aloe” is sometimes applied to this plant, because the large head of leaves customarily tilts toward the sun, instead of remaining upright as most aloes do. The thick leaves are bluegreen in color and up to 3 feet long, with tiny teeth along their edges that are so inconspicuous they can easily be overlooked.
In nature, plants often take on pink or lavender tinges when conditions are dry, but this does not usually happen to plants in cultivation. While many of the South African trunkforming aloes are consistently single-headed, Aloe speciosa sometimes divides at the growing tip to make specimens with two or more heads. The stem is surprisingly slender for such a large plant, but this is not readily apparent until it gets tall, since the dried old leaves cling to the stem and make it look stout.
Some of the tall winter-blooming aloes have flower stalks with multiple branches, such that dried ones look almost like deer’s antlers, but this is not the case with Aloe speciosa, which has short stalks with no branches at all. However, each stalk has hundreds of flowers packed together along its length, and there may be two or more emerging from the same head of leaves.
The flower cluster is shaped like an elongated cone, and at the bud stage it is all red or pinkish-red. As the flowers get ready to open, beginning at the bottom and progressing upward, they change from pinkish-red to white, or sometimes greenish-white. In addition, soon after the flowers open, the pollen-bearing anthers start to elongate and push out beyond the mouth of the flower, and they add more colors to the mix. The pollen is always yellow, but the filaments (that is, the stalks of the anthers) may be dark purple or rustyorange or reddish-brown. The overall effect is very showy, and indeed “speciosa” is Latin for “showy.”
One of the concerns with the aloes that bloom in winter is that cold snaps might damage the flowers. This is not so much of a worry for coastal gardens, where frosts seldom amount to much, but it can be a real problem in inland areas. Happily, Aloe speciosa has more cold tolerance than most species, and even survived the severe winter of 1990, when the temperature at the Ruth Bancroft Garden dropped all the way down to the low 20s. As a precaution, winter bloomers can be placed in sites where an overhead branch or eave gives a measure of extra protection.