Trees built for the desert
How trees survive where almost nothing can — deep taproots, water-filled trunks, green bark, and leaves that wait for rain.
- 01
Trees№ 2904 minMesquite: The Deep-Rooted Legume That Feeds and Invades Drylands
A thorny desert legume that fixes nitrogen, taps water metres down, feeds people and livestock with sugary pods — and has become one of the world's worst dryland invaders.
- 02
Trees№ 3404 minPalo Verde: The Green-Barked Tree That Photosynthesises Its Trunk
A desert legume that drops its leaves to save water and runs photosynthesis in its green bark instead — and quietly nurses the giant saguaro cactus to life in its shade.
- 03
Trees№ 1273 minDesert Ironwood: The Nurse Tree With Wood That Sinks
A slow Sonoran Desert legume that fixes nitrogen, shelters the desert's seedlings under its canopy, lives over a thousand years, and grows wood so dense it sinks — carved into art and, illegally, into charcoal.
- 04
Trees№ 1364 minDragon Tree: The Umbrella of Red-Sapped Branches
An outlandish monocot 'tree' that bleeds red resin, grows by splitting into ever-more umbrella branches, lives for centuries on desert islands — and can barely reproduce in the wild anymore.
- 05
Trees№ 3794 minQuiver Tree: The Desert Aloe on the Move From a Warming Land
A tree-sized aloe of the southern African desert whose hollowed branches made hunters' quivers — and which is now dying at the hot edge of its range and creeping south, one of the clearest living signs of a shifting climate.
- 06
Trees№ 3263 minOcotillo and Boojum: The Desert's Strangest Silhouettes
A fountain of thorny wands that leafs out within days of rain and a tapering upside-down carrot that looks drawn by Dr Seuss — two desert oddities that grow leaves only when water comes.
- 07
Trees№ 2394 minJoshua Tree and Yuccas: The Desert Trees Bound to a Single Moth
Spiky desert monocots that can only be pollinated by one small moth — and the moth can only breed in them — a partnership so tight that climate change now threatens both at once.
- 08
Trees№ 1744 minFrankincense and Myrrh: The Resin Trees That Built an Ancient Economy
Gnarled desert trees that seal their own wounds with fragrant gum — tapped for the incense that was once worth more than gold, and now threatened by the very tapping that made them famous.
- 09
Trees№ 2523 minKhejri: The Desert Tree People Died to Save
The 'king tree' of the Thar Desert — a nitrogen-fixing legume that feeds people and livestock where nothing else grows, revered by the Bishnoi, and the tree at the heart of history's most famous environmental martyrdom.
- 10
Trees№ 1263 minDesert Date: The Thorny Tree That Fights a Disease in the Water
A spiny, drought-proof tree of the Sahel whose bitter-sweet 'date' feeds the dry country, whose seeds press a fine oil — and whose fruit, dropped in water, kills the snails that carry one of Africa's great parasitic diseases.