Living Together
There are 40 or 50 species of Yucca in the US, most of them in the dessert. We happen to have a dense half acre of it near the creek. Our neighbor disked the field in the fall and again this spring in our attempt to remove the stiff, needle-tipped porcupine-like plants and put in some fruit trees there. A couple of plants survived along the margins, and I'm glad. Seeing their waxy white flowers reminds me of how perfectly nature's creatures have come to depend on each other. Yucca moths and yucca plants can't reproduce without each other (a "mutualism") so when these flowers appeared for the first time last week, I knew when I peeked inside, there would be several slender dark-eyed white boths inside.
There are proabably yuccas where you live. Yucca filamentosa is the most common species over the eastern half of the country. Inside the partially closed flowers you'll find the moths resting during the day. Then read about the rest of the story. Remarkable!