Buy Aloe mutabilis

A beautiful, large, shrubby aloe with bi-color blooms and a trailing stem up to 1 meter long with offshoots. This aloe typically grows 3 to 4 feet tall and topped by 18 to 24 inch wide rosettes of narrow soft-toothed blue-green leaves. A hanging or cliff-dwelling aloe.

This plant is attractive to hummingbirds and bees and deer resistant. Makes a showy addition to a low-water garden. Its bicolored racemes make it a popular garden plant. It makes a magnificent rockery specimen when grown at the highest point of the rockery with the rosette hanging downward. Use in containers and as bold clumps in the landscape.

Learn more about Aloe mutabilis

This plant has been grown in a 5 ga pot. You will receive a very similar plant to the one in the picture. The plant is shipped "dry-root" (without soil).

One of the most commonly grown aloes in the Bay Area, and also in southern California, is Aloe arborescens. It has two close relatives with much smaller areas of occurrence in nature, and one of these is Aloe mutabilis. This species comes from the northeastern part of South Africa, where it grows on cliffs and steep rocky slopes in the highland area near Johannesburg. Some authorities think that Aloe mutabilis is close enough to A. arborescens that it should be classed as a subspecies or form, rather than a species in its own right, but it differs in several respects. For one thing, the leaves of A. mutabilis are blue-green in color, while those of A. arborescens are generally green. Also, A. mutabilis has stems that seldom reach more than 3 feet in length (often creeping along the ground), and it branches somewhat sparingly. In contrast, A. arborescens is a prolific brancher and grows to be a much larger and bushier plant over time. There are floral differences as well. The most striking distinction is that in most populations of A. mutabilis the flowers change color as they mature, with the red buds giving way to yellow (or yellow-tipped) open flowers. This changeability is presumably the source of its name (mutable = changeable), and this contrasts with A. arborescens, whose buds and open flowers are of the same color. In addition, the flowers of A. mutabilis are a little shorter, and they tend to be a little wider at the mouth instead of evenly tubular as with A. arborescens. Both species flower during the winter months, and provide a welcome splash of color in the garden, inviting to both people and hummingbirds. Of course, hummingbirds do not occur in Africa, and in habitat it is sunbirds which visit the flowers instead.