Aloes are very popular and some of the most rewarding plants to cultivate. They make excellent accent plants owing to their often strange and inspiring architectures, as well as the bright flowers that offset the grey-green leaves. They are also very suitable as container plants and small aloes can be used very effectively as border plants at the edge of a bed. Although aloes are most often included in rockeries, their application in horticulture is not limited to this feature and they can be used in almost any setting and in conjunction with most common garden plants. Their natural adaptation to harsh and often arid climates makes aloes outstanding subjects for the water-wise garden. Aloe is a genus in the Asphodeloideae family containing about 600 species of flowering succulent plants. Aloes are sometimes confused with Agaves. Contrarily to Agaves, Aloe leaves contain a gel like sap. Another difference is that Aloes don’t die after blooming as most Agaves do.

Similar in general appearance to a green-leaved Aloe cryptopoda, Aloe lutescens differs in forming colonies and in producing inflorescences with three, rather than one or two, racemes which attracts birds to the garden. These slender racemes may be more than twice as long and bear larger papery bracts that obscure the small buds in the upper portion of the raceme. Its bicolored racemes resemble the similarly-coloured form of Aloe cryptopoda known as Aloe wickensii. The epithet lutescens, becoming yellow, aptly describes the transition of red buds to open yellow flowers. Aloe lutescens commonly known as Malapati Aloe also has a more restricted distribution in the Northern Province of South Africa.