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Aloe schoelleri – A 3 foot wide usually solitary rosette forming aloe with thick stems holding very wide deltoid shaped thick leaves that are at first bright green and aging to gray green with some purple tones, particularly when grown dry. The leaf margins are bright red with well-spaced red teeth. Flowers in mid spring that are densely clustered along few branched tall inflorescences are a peach color with showy exserted bright orange stamens.
Plant in full sun in a well-drained soil with regular, occasional to infrequent irrigation. Should prove cold hardy at least to short duration temperatures down around 20° F. This is a showy aloe a bit like Aloe rubroviolacea but flowering later with lighter colored flowers.
Aloe schoelleri grows hanging from cliffs of the Amba Souara Gorge, at the edge of the Kohaito Plateau in Eritrea near where Aloe camperi and Aloe elegans are also found. It was described in 1894 by the German botanist and ethnologist Georg August Schweinfurth, but without much detailed information other than he named it to honor the German ethnologist Max Shoeller, who travelled widely in Africa where he met Schweinfurth. It remained seemingly unknown for over a century until the Zimbabwe naturalist Darrel Plowes recognized it was something unusual from near Schweinfurth’s locality and sent plants to the botanical explorer John Lavranos who flowered it, determining it to be the long-lost Aloe schoelleri. The species seems most closely related to Aloe rubroviolacea, which occurs across the Red Sea in Yemen.
Our plants came to us from Steven Duey who through controlled pollination of plants sent to him by John Lavranos and botanical explorer Gary James were able to make plants available in the California succulent nursery trade and through wider distribution through the Huntington Botanic Gardens International Succulent Introductions program as Aloe schoelleri ISI 2020-16 (HBG 136300). The picture on this page courtesy of the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek, California.
Information displayed on this page about Aloe schoelleri is based on our research conducted about this plant in our nursery library as well as from information provided by reliable online resources. We also include our own observations made about it as it has grown in the nursery gardens and other gardens visited, as well how the crops of this plant performed in the containers in our nursery field. We will also include comments received from others and welcome hearing from anyone who has information about this plant, particularly if it includes cultural information aiding others to better grow it.
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