PlantFiles: Kraal Aloe, Jackal's Tail Aloe
Aloe claviflora

9b coastal Otago NZ

Super-beautiful plant and well worth the effort of fulfilling it's requirements. I too have found this aloe hard to please as far as water is concerned, but then I shouldn't complain since Im trying to grow it in pretty unsuitable conditions! It seems to be one of the more desert-specific aloes, not really adapting to regular water too well, and letting it sit wet in winter results in root rot faster than you can say the words.
That said, my small example had the roots rotted right off it's little arsecheeks and was close to death before I extricated it and sat it in some dryish pumice, after which it obliged me by developing new roots and beginning to recover.
So if you have a nice specimen that's showing signs of rot, don't despair, cut away the nasty stuff and give it a chance to grow some more before binning it.
Wet winters are a no no. Likes as much heat and sun exposure as you can give it. Mine's staying on a hot windowsill from now on.

Easily one of the BEST Aloes for the deserts of Arizona. It tolerates the heat, a good amount of sun and went through 19F in 2007 unscathed. The flower show is AMAZING every spring and you'll soon realize that one plant alone isn't enough. Try growing at least 7 plants in a group and sit back for a grand show!

South African stemless aloe. Suckers, but forms dense clumps so suckers right next to mother plant. As colony ages, the center plants die leaving an ever widening circle of clustered plants. These plants actually have stems/trunks, but they run along the ground for 1-2 meters. For some reason the blooms all point out away from the center of the cluster. Leaves slight rough in texture, thick, stiff and brittle, and strikingly pale green to grey-green with sparse, black marginal teeth. Flowers single, dense racemes of red to yellow (usually redder near tips and turning yellow with age) and tend to grow laterally, instead of upright.

Note: this species is readily prone to rot if allowed to get too wet in summer, or wet AND cold in winter (as I have discovered on multiple occasions). Small plants that still have fat, thick leaves clustered together are particularly prone to leaf rot, so best to grow seedlings in protected pots up to a size at which point the leaves start to separate a bit. Larger plants, on the other hand, are quite cold hardy (as long as they stay dry. I have one that not only was unaffected by temps into the high 20s, while nearly all the surround aloes were either turned to mush, or at least badly damaged, this one kept on pushing its flowers... even the flowers were not touched which was very unusual for this freeze we had Jan 2007- even those aloes that seemed cold hardy, all lost their flowers except this one.