Huisache

Full sun. Semi-evergreen in warm winters, with delicate fernlike foliage, fragrant yellow puff blooms and a spreading, vaselike shape. Young branches are fully armed with white thorns (the name is a Nahuatl term for “many thorns”) but these become less obtrusive as the plant matures.

Fast-growing and drought-tolerant, huisache provides easy, breezy shade and has been widely cultivated for perfume-making and as an ornamental. It’s often one of the first tree species to invade abandoned farm fields, so many Texans are more familiar with it as brush than as a specimen tree.