I'm standing under the canopy of one of my favorite trees. It's a screw bean mesquite about twenty years old, but with that shaggy bark hanging off it, it looks like it's two hundred. That's the kind of magic you only get from a tree that actually belongs to this place.
It's one of our native mesquites, along with the honey mesquite. The velvet mesquite is North American too. There are some South American mesquites out there, but all in all, I think the North American ones are better suited for life here in Southern Nevada. They evolved with our soils, our heat, and — most importantly — our water. This particular tree gets watered about five or seven times a year. That's it.
Which brings me to the first thing I want you to know about desert trees: the right tree in the right yard is the whole game.
When a Mesquite Is (and Isn't) the Right Tree for You
Mesquites are big. If you have a small yard, you shouldn't have a mesquite. I know that isn't what you want to hear when you've fallen in love with the look of one, but the math doesn't lie — a mature mesquite can reach thirty, thirty-five feet in spread. If you've got a twenty-foot front yard and a two-story house, it won't work. You're going to end up pruning it for size, forever, and that makes it even more expensive. It also means the tree doesn't look as good, because a mesquite that spends its whole life being cut back to fit a space that's too small never quite looks like itself.
They're also higher maintenance than people expect. Mesquites want to grow down on the ground. To get a traditional tree shape — where you can walk underneath a canopy — you have to do a type of pruning called lifting, which means removing the lower branches so the crown rises up. That takes work, and it takes ongoing work.
And here's where I get on my soapbox: please get a good arborist. Someone who's actually looking at the structure of the tree, watching for weak crotches or weak unions — meaning two branches of roughly the same diameter competing at the same junction, which is a split waiting to happen — watching for crossing branches, thinking about the tree as a whole system. A cheap pruning job on a mesquite can ruin the tree.
But if you have the room? Man, they're cool trees. Especially as a backdrop, as the anchor of a larger landscape, these things are drought-tolerant to a degree that still surprises me.
Why the Screw Bean Is My Favorite
Of all the mesquites, the screw bean is the one that gets me. It's that shaggy bark I keep mentioning, a twenty-year-old screw bean looks like a two-hundred-year-old anything else. It is a really cool effect.
The seeds are where the tree gets its name. They're little screw-shaped pods, and they're actually edible. All the mesquite seed pods are edible, in fact. Native Americans used them for many years — you can make flour from them. They're beautiful. They attract wildlife, and they provide for wildlife.
Just remember what I said: give her room. A screw bean at full spread — thirty, thirty-five feet — is not a small-yard tree. Force her into a small yard and you're paying to prune her for the rest of her life.
Medium Trees for Medium Yards: Texas Ebony, Desert Willow, Palo Verde
Not every yard has room for a mesquite, and not every landscape needs one. If you're looking for a medium-sized desert tree — something in the twenty-foot-spread range — think Texas ebony or desert willow. Both handle our climate beautifully, and neither is going to swallow a suburban front yard.
Palo verdes are worth mentioning here too, though most of them also get big. The foothill palo verde is a little bit smaller than the others, but you still need to give it room to grow.
For Small Yards: Meet the Fern of the Desert
Here's the tree I recommend to people with small yards who still want that mesquite look. It's called the fern of the desert. It isn't a mesquite, but it looks like one — it has that same soft, feathery mesquite-type leaf that's so beautiful in a desert landscape. The tree itself stays upright, but the leaves weep down, which gives the whole plant a graceful, weeping quality.
In spring you get little puffball flowers — creamy white-yellow, kind of dreamy. The tree tops out around twelve feet, maybe fifteen. And it's thornless, which matters more than you might think in a yard where kids play or where you like to walk barefoot on a summer evening.
The botanical name is lysiloma watsonii. It's a great tree and hard to find at most nurseries, but worth the hunt. If you've got a small yard and you want something that looks like it belongs here, this is the one to look up.
Why Our "Poor" Soil Isn't Poor at All
I'll use the polite word: our native soils are poor. Low in nutrients, high in alkalinity — the kind of ground that would make a rose gardener weep. But here's what I want you to hear: it's not poor to the desert trees. The desert trees love this stuff. Low nutrients, high alkalinity — this is what they will thrive in here in Southern Nevada.
This is the part of desert gardening that I think shifts something for people once they really understand it. We've inherited an idea of what a "good" yard looks like from wetter, greener places — thick lawns, thirsty ornamentals, rich dark soil you can sink a shovel into. And we spend a lot of money and a lot of water trying to force that idea onto a landscape that has never wanted to be that. Meanwhile, the mesquite and the palo verde and the fern of the desert are standing right there, asking for almost nothing, ready to give us shade and beauty and habitat if we'll just let them be what they are.
The right desert tree in the right yard is one of the great gifts of living in Southern Nevada. Water it a handful of times a year. Prune it well when it needs it. And then step back and let it look like the place we actually live.
Norm Schilling is the owner of Schilling Horticulture Group in Las Vegas and co-host of Desert Bloom on KNPR. Send your gardening questions to letters@knpr.org.
