Fay’s Yucca Plant

The programme ‘Fay’s Yucca Plant’ is published on the podcast ‘Our Plant Stories’ hosted by Sally Flatman. Sally interviews Fay about the yucca she bought her father in 1976 for Christmas from Marks & Spencer in Brighton after her first term at Sussex University reading art history. Her father, no gardener, fed the small yucca bottles of Baby Bio bought from the local petrol station. He poured the whole bottles neat in one go. The yucca grew into a towering being with many shoots, dominating the suburban front room. Fay and Sally discuss how this plant nearly died, how it was nursed back to health, and what it means to Fay now. The yucca evokes strong memories of her father. It IS her father.

Fay has drawn the yucca over many years. This study is a detail from ‘Memory Box: About my Father’, drawn in 2012 in recovery and being nursed back to health.