Along with a few large oaks, some cabbage palms of varying size, a coral honeysuckle, a variegated Agave angustifolia, and a crinum, this species was one of the plants that was here when we arrived/bought in 2006. Back then it was Aloe saponaria; it's still called the soap aloe. Don't hate the taxonomists; they only go where the science leads them. (and the nomenclatural protocols) We discovered early on that these flowers are amongst the favorites of hummingbirds. Since we started to garden here, we've planted dozens of "hummingbird magnets". There are a handful of nectar plants that truly do attract hummingbirds. Most of the rest are visited occasionally or even never.
They are the easiest plants in the world to move. Just slide a shovel under them, pry up, and pick up the plant with however many roots you got. You don't need any. Now you can plop it down anywhere and it'll eventually root. Even bare sand in full sun in the middle of summer. It may look a bit sad before it grows roots and experiences enough rain to rehydrate it but it will survive 100% of the time and start sending out runners within a year.
In the beginning the garden was empty and this was a great cheap source of a lot of plants. I created 5 colonies around the space thinking that, when the flowers came, it would be a wonderful design element to pull your eyes through space. Alas, while the plants in any one clump bloom together, different clumps, in different spaces, don't. And as the years passed and growth happened, some clumps got so shaded they barely flowered at all. A few diminished to a point where, out of mercy, I moved them back to better sites. Oh well. they're still beautiful plants even if there's only two colonies left.
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