By Bill Ward
Published in The Boerne Star on October 1, 2004
If you drove westward toward the Trans-Pecos earlier this summer, you know that 2004 is the Year of the Sotol. The early-summer rains must have encouraged every single sotol in southwestern Texas to send up a flower stalk. In some places there are literally forests of the straw-colored bloom poles.
Sotol (Dasylirion sp.) is the October Plant of the Month for Operation NICE! (Natives Instead of the Common Eхotics!). These cousins to the yucca make easy-to-grow drought-tolerant and deer-resistant landscape plants. They are favored for their handsome fountain of long narrow evergreen leaves, which build into plant 2.5-3 feet high. The trunks are hidden close to the ground so that the plant appears as a large dense rosette of glossy narrow leaves an inch wide and one to three feet long. The leaves are edged with sharp teeth. Commonly during the late spring, sotol plants will sprout a bloom stalk that, in time, extends up to 10 or 15 feet long. The long flower plume at the end of the stalk is a dense cluster of small greenish-yellow blooms, which attract butterflies and hummingbirds.
During late fall the long, straight bloom stalks can be cut and dried. They make good lightweight hiking staffs, or they could be good bean poles in a vegetable garden. In rural northern Mexico sotol poles are used for temporary fences and corrals and for fuel.
Sotols are so easy to grow that they are used in a wide variety of garden settings. To me they look nice with other drought-resistant plants such as blackfoot daisy (Melampodium leucanthum), zexmenia (Wedelia hispida), prickly pear (Opuntia spp.), cenizo (Leucophyllum frutescens), yucca (Yucca spp.), and so forth. Sotols are very appropriate for rock gardens and rocky hillsides. They make good security hedges to block traffic through an area. No man nor beast wants to wade through those sharp-toothed leaves. Deer browsing ordinarily is not a problem, except that tender young bloom stalks might be nibbled.
The Boerne Chapter of the Native Plant Society of Texas provides free planting and care instructions for sotol at Boerne nurseries participating in Operation NICE!: Hill Country African Violets and Nursery, Barkley’s Nursery Center, and Maldonado Landscape and Nursery. Other nurseries participating in NICE!, through the cooperation of the Blanco County Master Gardeners, are Blanco Gardens in Blanco, The Old Lumber Yard in Johnson City, and The Planter Boх in Marble Falls.
There are three native-Texas sotols used in landscaping in the state. Texas sotol (Dаsylirion texanum) is native to the Edwards Plateau and central Trans-Pecos Texas and northern Mexico. This sotol does very well in gardens of the Boerne area. Other sotols that might be found in nurseries are smooth-leaf sotol (D. leiophyllum) and Wheeler sotol (D. wheeleri). These are found in Trans-Pecos Texas. New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Marshall Johnston described a fourth Texas species (D. heteracanthium) in southern Trans-Pecos Texas.
Recent genetic studies have shown that sotols are most related, not to yuccas with which they are commonly confused, but to Nolina (bear grass and devil’s shoestring).
Indians of the Chihuahuan Desert have long used sotol leaves to make baskets, mats, and paper. The Indians also roasted or steamed the crown of sotol for eating or for grinding into flour for baking. Besides that, the juice was fermented to make an alcoholic drink.
Today in the state of Chihuahua is a growing industry to produce the alcoholic beverage “sotol” to compete with tequila, a beverage distilled from sotol’s cousin the agave or century plant. Sotol margarita, anyone?
