I first came across the yucca tree when I was in high school, a long time ago.
At lunch time we used to eat pancit (noodles) from a carinderia, a mini-eatery, near our school, just a few yards away from Los Angeles Bakery, another high-school students’ favourite haunt at that time.
Anyway, I remember the eatery was run by a woman who had a lovely gated house with a verdant front garden. One day when we went for our noodles, we found her cutting with gusto a rather robust beautiful tree-like plant. We asked her, as we admired the plant, what it was. She said it was a fortune tree and it was a lucky tree, something that would bring you good luck. We all timidly asked her if we could have a cutting from her tree.
She said NO!!! She explained that for the fortune tree to work, it must given to you wholeheartedly, meaning it must be offered as a gift, without the giver being asked for it.
With hindsight, I think our carinderia entrepreneur did not want to share her fortune with us her customers because she might not have anymore starving young girls coming in for her pancit! LOL Perhaps we can’t all be bourgeoisie like her. 😉
When I came here in London, I found that the name given to this fortune plant was yucca.
We had our yucca for 20+ years. It was a house plant. It became straggly that we put it outside in the garden. The frost got it, we thought, as it began to lose all its sword-like leaves. But we could not really bare to throw it altogether and thought the long balding trunk looks structurally nice next to our potted apple trees.
By all intent and purposes, the yucca was dead but last spring, it started to sprout some leaves from the root of the dead trunk. More stems came through while the long old trunk came off. Now it is growing nicely. Hope it means our fortune is growing as well. The only think is the yucca was not given to us freely or as a freebie; we bought it in a garden centre in Childshill which is now defunct! Hope this yucca will bring us only good fortune……
Though we are still waiting for the big one, we thank the Lord for our blessings!
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- Yucca Tree Photo by JMorton
