Aloe ciliaris

Appearance

They can be differentiated from other climbing aloes by the way that the soft, white, hair-like teeth (=ciliaris) that grow along the margins of the leaves, extend all the way around the stem, at the base of the leaf.

The fleshy leaves themselves are strongly recurved (helping to anchor the tall stems in dense thickets and assist the aloe in climbing). The leaf sheaths are conspicuously striped green and white.

These aloes grow very quickly, producing long, thin, untidy stems that shoot upwards, producing large bright orange-red flowers once they reach the sun. If there are no nearby trees to act as host and support, it just forms a straggly shrub.

The red flowers appear mostly from November to April.

Distribution

Aloe ciliaris is naturally widespread in the coastal and thicket vegetation of the Eastern Cape, flowing over the Western Cape border. Especially in dry river valleys where they grow in thorny forests, their long stems pushing rapidly upwards and out through the thicket canopy. Their recurved leaves act as hooks, allowing the plant to anchor itself in the thick vegetation.

This climbing aloe seems to have developed from the smaller, rarer, more delicate Aloe tidmarshi (now re-classified as a subspecies, Aloe ciliaris tidmarshi) and to have spread out across the region relatively recently. The ancestral Tidmarshi subspecies remains restricted to the Albany thickets of the Eastern Cape, between Grahamstown and Uitenhage.

They grow very easily from cuttings, and they have been planted in gardens all over South Africa. This is the fastest growing of all Aloes.

An introduced population in Kenya was reported in 1950 by the botanist Reynolds (1950:353).

Related species

Aloe ciliaris is part of a group of related climbing aloes ("Macrifoliae") that grow throughout Southern Africa. Some other species in this group are: Aloe tenuior, Aloe gracilis, Aloe commixta, Aloe juddii and Aloe striatula.