Random Desert Plant Generator

What the desert plant generator does

You want a desert plant. For a garden, a drawing, a story, a xeriscape plan, or because you saw Boojum Tree on the list and could not quite believe it.

This gives you one. Pull a batch and you will get a spread from the saguaro everyone pictures to the ocotillo, the quiver tree, and the almost unbelievable Welwitschia.

What follows is a way of understanding every plant on this list at once. The desert sets one brutal problem, too little water and too much heat, and there are really only three fundamentally different solutions to it. Once you know the three, you can look at any desert plant and immediately understand how it survives.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One for a subject, a handful to browse.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

There are only three ways to survive a desert

Every plant on this list is solving the same problem, and although the solutions look wildly different, they nearly all fall into just three strategies. Learn these three and the whole list snaps into focus.

Store the water. The first strategy is to become a living reservoir. When the rare rain comes, grab as much as possible and hoard it in fat tissue to live on through the long drought. These are the succulents, and they are all over this list. The saguaro, the barrel cactus, the prickly pear, the agave, the aloe, all are essentially water tanks with skin, swelling after rain and slowly shrinking as they live off the stored supply. Their thick, fleshy bodies are not for show, they are the storage, and the spines that so often come with them are the leaves turned into armour to protect that precious water from thirsty animals.

Reach for the water. The second strategy is the opposite. Do not store water, go and find it, by growing roots to reach moisture that shallow-rooted plants cannot. Some desert plants, like the mesquite on this list, grow astonishingly deep roots, among the deepest of any plant, plunging far down to tap groundwater the surface never sees, so the plant stays supplied while everything around it dries out. Others spread wide, shallow root networks to grab every drop of a brief rain across a large area before it evaporates. Either way the strategy is plumbing, not storage, investing in roots rather than in a tank.

Wait it out, or dodge it. The third strategy is to avoid the drought entirely by timing. Some desert plants spend most of the year as dormant seeds or bulbs, doing nothing, waiting, and then explode into life only when rain finally comes, growing, flowering and setting seed in a frantic few weeks before dying back, having dodged the dry season by simply not being active during it. This is why a desert can burst into a carpet of wildflowers after a good rain, seemingly from nowhere, many of the poppies and annuals on this list are these opportunists, present all along as seeds, waiting for their moment.

Almost every plant here is running one of these three, storing, reaching, or waiting, and often a combination. So when the generator hands you a desert plant, the useful question is which strategy is it using, because that single answer tells you how it is built, why it looks the way it does, and how it survives a place that should kill it.

A plant on this list has two leaves and lives a thousand years

Pull Welwitschia from this list, because it is one of the strangest living things on Earth and most people have never heard of it.

It grows in the brutal Namib Desert of southwestern Africa, one of the oldest and driest deserts there is, and it looks like a heap of torn, leathery straps sprawled on the bare gravel. Here is the astonishing part. That entire sprawling mess is just two leaves. In its whole life, a Welwitschia grows only two leaves, ever, the same two it started with, and they simply keep growing from the base, year after year, getting longer and longer and splitting and fraying in the desert wind into what looks like many, until they lie in a great tangled pile around the plant.

And it does this for a very, very long time. Welwitschia plants routinely live over a thousand years, and the oldest are estimated at around two thousand years old. So there are individual Welwitschia alive in the Namib right now that were already growing when the Roman Empire stood, still slowly extending the same two leaves they have had for their entire multi-thousand-year existence. It is sometimes called a living fossil, the sole survivor of an ancient lineage with no close living relatives, a plant essentially left over from a vanished age.

How does it survive two thousand years in one of the driest places on the planet? Partly by tapping deep water, and significantly by harvesting the fog that rolls in off the cold Atlantic, condensing moisture from the air onto its leaves where little rain ever falls. It is a plant that drinks fog, grows two immortal leaves, and outlives civilisations, sitting quietly on this list between more ordinary desert plants. If you ever doubted that the desert produces genuine wonders, Welwitschia is the answer.

The Joshua tree is not a tree, and needs one moth

The Joshua tree is on this list, iconic symbol of the American southwest, and two things about it are worth knowing, because both upend what the name suggests.

First, it is not a tree. Despite the name and the size, the Joshua tree is a species of yucca, which makes it closer to grasses and lilies than to what we normally call trees. It has no true wood and no growth rings like a real tree, it is a giant woody-stemmed member of a very different plant group that simply grows tall and branching enough to look tree-like. So the most famous tree of the Mojave is not botanically a tree at all, which is a good reminder that common names describe what a plant looks like, not what it is.

Second, and more remarkable, the Joshua tree depends utterly on a single kind of insect to exist, in one of the tightest partnerships in nature. It is pollinated only by the yucca moth, and by nothing else, no bees, no other insects, only this one moth. And the relationship is astonishingly precise. The female yucca moth actively gathers the tree's pollen into a ball, flies to another Joshua tree flower, and deliberately packs the pollen onto it, pollinating it on purpose, then lays her eggs inside that same flower. Her caterpillars will eat some of the seeds that the pollination produces, but only some, leaving enough for the tree to reproduce. Each depends completely on the other, the tree cannot make seeds without the moth doing the pollinating, and the moth's young cannot eat without the seeds the pollination creates.

This is why the Joshua tree cannot simply move or be casually transplanted to survive, and why it is genuinely threatened by climate change, because its survival is chained to the moth, and the moth's to it. Neither can exist where the other cannot. So the great spiky silhouette of the Joshua tree, standing against a desert sunset, is only there because a small moth chooses, deliberately, to carry its pollen, an entire species of tree resting on the wingbeats of an insect most people have never seen.

Where these come from

The plants here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is drawn out of it at random.

That is the whole thing, and it runs on your own device.

Growing them, and keeping them alive

Desert plants are increasingly popular in gardens, partly because they save water, and if the generator handed you one to grow, the care follows directly from the three strategies above.

The number one killer is too much water. This is the single most important thing and the commonest mistake, because these are plants built for drought, and treating them with the generosity you would give a normal plant drowns them. Their roots are adapted to soak up occasional rain and then sit in dry ground, so constantly moist soil rots them. When in doubt, do not water. A desert plant would far rather be too dry than too wet, and overwatering kills far more of them than neglect ever could.

Drainage is everything. Because standing water is fatal, the soil must drain fast, which is why desert plants need gritty, sandy, free-draining soil and pots with drainage holes, never heavy soil that holds water around the roots. Get the drainage right and you have solved most of desert-plant care, get it wrong and no amount of careful watering will save the plant from sitting in the wet it cannot tolerate. Many failures blamed on other things are really just soil that stayed too wet.

They want more light than you think. These are plants of open, blazing, shadeless places, so most of them crave the brightest, sunniest spot available and will grow weak, pale and stretched in shade. A desert plant in a dim corner is a plant slowly failing, so give them your sunniest window or spot, and be realistic that a genuinely low-light home may not suit them at all. They are sun-worshippers by deep adaptation.

Respect how slowly they grow. Many desert plants grow extraordinarily slowly, a consequence of the harsh, resource-poor life they are built for, so patience is part of keeping them. A saguaro can take a decade to reach the height of your hand and many years more to branch, and even smaller desert plants often creep along at a pace that tests an impatient gardener. The large specimen in the shop is not fast-growing, it is old, so buy the size you want or be prepared to wait a very long time.

Know the poisonous and painful ones. Some plants on this list carry real hazards worth knowing before you bring them home, especially around children and pets. Many have vicious spines, the teddy bear cholla is notorious for its barbed segments that cling painfully to skin, and some, like the sacred datura on this list, are seriously poisonous if eaten. Others in the broader group have caustic sap. So handle spiny species with care and check whether a specific plant is toxic before placing it where a child or animal could reach it.

Questions people ask

Are all desert plants cacti or succulents?

No, and this is a common misunderstanding, because while many desert plants store water as succulents do, plenty use the other strategies instead. Deep-rooted plants like mesquite are not succulents at all, they survive by reaching water rather than storing it, and the many desert wildflowers that wait out the drought as seeds are ordinary non-succulent annuals. And crucially, not all succulents are cacti, cacti are one specific family, while succulence, storing water in the tissue, is a strategy many unrelated plant families have independently evolved. The desert contains far more variety of survival strategy than the cactus stereotype suggests.

Can you really drink water from a cactus?

Far less than survival stories suggest, and trying can make you ill, so it is a dangerous myth. Most cacti do not hold drinkable water, the moisture is bound up in a thick, often bitter or mildly toxic pulp rather than sitting as free liquid, and several species contain compounds that cause vomiting or worse, which in a survival situation makes things dangerously worse, not better. The image of slicing a cactus for a refreshing drink is largely fiction. There is also the matter that damaging protected desert plants like the saguaro is illegal in many places, and taken seriously.

How do desert plants survive with so little water?

Through the three strategies at the heart of this page, storing water, reaching deep for it, or timing their lives around it, usually combined with clever tricks to lose as little water as possible. Many reduce their leaves to spines or tiny scales to cut water loss, since broad leaves bleed moisture into dry air. Many also use a special form of photosynthesis that lets them open their pores only at night, when it is cool, taking in the gas they need in darkness and keeping sealed against the sun by day. Every feature of a desert plant is ultimately about getting water, keeping it, or not wasting it.

Are desert plants good for saving water in a garden?

Yes, and this is a major reason for their popularity, especially in dry regions where water is scarce or expensive. Landscaping with drought-adapted plants, often called xeriscaping, can dramatically cut the water a garden needs compared to a conventional lawn and thirsty ornamentals, because these plants are built to thrive on the little rain that falls naturally. Beyond saving water they need less overall care once established, since they are adapted to poor soil and neglect. Just be sure to choose species suited to your specific climate, as a plant from one desert may not suit conditions elsewhere.

Can I use this for a garden plan or a project?

Yes to both. As a garden aid, pull a few and check their needs, climate, hardiness, adult size, before choosing, since desert plants vary widely and some grow far larger or need warmer conditions than others. As a project, any plant here opens onto genuinely fascinating science, the three survival strategies, the astonishing Welwitschia, the Joshua tree and its moth. Start by working out which of the three strategies your plant uses, because that single question explains most of how it looks and lives, and turns a spiky curiosity into a story of survival.

References

1. Bornman, C. H. (1978). Welwitschia: Paradox of a Parched Paradise. Cape Town: C. Struik. https://www.worldcat.org/title/welwitschia-paradox-of-a-parched-paradise
2. Pellmyr, O. (2003). Yuccas, yucca moths, and coevolution: a review. Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 90(1), 35 to 55. https://doi.org/10.2307/3298524
3. Nobel, P. S. (1988). Environmental Biology of Agaves and Cacti. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/9780521364621