PlantFiles: Flat-flowered Aloe
Aloe marlothii

Mighty, hardy, undemanding, always impressive. Mine are just about to start trunking but they grow very well down here all over New Zealand, even with our very wet winters, and we have some massive specimens. Like most aloes, they grow faster with a little attention to water and feeding, and half-decent soil. Very frost hardy for a succulent plant, and another thing I love about it is its ability to resist hail damage, which can pock mark and scar some softer-leaved aloes (we get quite a bit of hail in winter.)
Personally I love the thorns but they can cause injury if you rub against them naked :-)
Looking forward to the wonderful flowers.

Here in the bay area they do very good, if a little slow growing. As they get a few feet of trunk and bloom, marlothii's are stand out plants not confused with any other plant around here. Pretty cold tolerant.Mine withstood the freeze of 07 pretty much unscathed. The flowers on the other hand were freeze dried..good thing it had already been blooming a couple of weeks before the freeze. It also makes a great defender for your yard-the spines and chunky leaves discourage trespassers.

This plant is a single-trunked tree Aloe that can eventually get to 20 feet with age. The leaves are large, heavy, and very spiney along the ridges and outside of the leaves.

It is a very easy to grow Aloe. Minimum maintenance except if one wants to remove the old, dried leaves along the stem. Looks better with the dried leaves along the stem in my opinion--giving it the appearance of a Palm skirt.

This is one of the more impressive Aloes to be grown in the xeriscape gardens of the southwest. It is NOT a user-friendly species as its heavy leaves can be completely covered with incredibly sturdy, sharp black spines (some forms have almost no spines, though). Having transplanted several, they are painfully heavy plants and usually leave one's back sore as well as bleeding from every location you touch them. There has to be a lot of hybridizing in this species as I have seen 3 distinct and completely different flower types identified in botanical gardens as this species... anyone know what the true A marlothii flower looks like? turns out there are a huge variety out there...

the KwaZulu form of this plant has nearly upright yellow flowers with a touch of red and/or orange in them and was called Aloe spectabilis until recently combined with A marlothii. This form looks similar to the KwaZulu form of A ferox, called Aloe candelabrum, but the flowers on that plant are completely upright, and usually more orange to red.

There are white and coral flowered forms of the species too. All Aloe species hybridize easily, garden seed is unreliable if more than one species are being grown.

Flat-flowered Aloe is native to South Africa where it grows on rocky slopes at at medium altitude. The gray-green leaves of this succulent are spined and quite thick. They are generally single stemmed from which bright blooms appear mid-winter when they are a welcome sight on dull days. The frequent dead leaves of this plant can give it an untidy appearance.

Orgin: Botswana; Transvaal; Natal