Nolina microcarpa
species of plant

Nolina microcarpa is a species of flowering plant in the asparagus family known by the common names sacahuista and palmilla. Like other species of Nolina, it may be called beargrass. It is native to northern Mexico and the southwestern United States in Arizona and New Mexico. It does occur in the southwestern corner of Utah, where it has a limited distribution on Navajo Sandstone, but reports of it occurring in Texas may be in error.
Sacahuista is variable in appearance. In general it is a large plant that grows in clumps up to two meters wide. It produces a rosette of many narrow leaves each up to 130 centimetres (4.3 feet) long but only 1.2 centimetres (0.47 inches) wide. The grasslike leaf blades are thick, rough, and serrated. There is no aboveground stem; the leaves grow from a woody underground caudex. When the plant flowers it produces a scape up to 1.5 to 1.8 m (4.9 to 5.9 ft) tall.
“Nolina microcarpa” enters the record as species of plant. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nolina, microcarpa and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q292609. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nolina microcarpa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.