Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Its flowers carry six free {tepal}s with no division into sepals and petals, six {stamen}s, and a seed chamber standing above them, ripening into a dry {capsule}. Its flowers are strung along a branched stalk, each in the axil of a small bract, and are never bunched into a head wrapped at the base by a papery sheath. Its leaves are stiff, fibrous and sword-shaped, ending in a sharp terminal spine, neither soft and broad nor thick and succulent. Its flowers hang as heavy nodding bells with thick fleshy filaments, and in the wild they are pollinated by nothing but a small moth that gathers pollen deliberately and packs it onto the stigma by hand. That moth lays her eggs in the same flower she pollinates, so the larvae eat some of the very seeds her work created, and neither partner can reproduce without the other. Long curling white threads peel away from its leaf margins, 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) of them, thickest towards the leaf base. It builds no trunk at all: the {rosette} sits flat on the ground, 2 to 3 feet (60 to 90 cm) tall and 3 to 4 feet (90 to 120 cm) across. Every year or two a single stalk shoots 4 to 8 feet (1.2 to 2.4 m) clear of the {rosette} carrying a {panicle} of creamy bells 1.5 to 2 inches (4 to 5 cm) long. After flowering the central rosette dies away and is replaced by the {offset}s that have crowded up around its base, so the clump creeps outward rather than upward. The epithet means thread-bearing, for exactly those fraying leaf margins. Native to the sandy soils of the southeastern United States, it is the hardiest and most widely planted of its kind in cold-winter gardens, where those marginal threads earned it the folk name of a needle belonging to the first man.

Accepted Answer

Yucca filamentosa

Name That Plant #058