Nitraria retusa

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 6 observations

This species has been photographed under an open licence only 6 times, so some figures below are different views of the same plant, taken on the same day, rather than different individuals. They are usually different parts of it: the leaf, the flower, the bark.

Nitraria retusa, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. a Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-04-13 / obs. 188818987

Nitraria retusa, photographed by Even Dankowicz — fig. c Even Dankowicz, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 55412310

Nitraria retusa, photographed by Olivier Argagnon — fig. d Olivier Argagnon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179286243

Nitraria retusa, photographed by Paul Braun — fig. e Paul Braun, CC0 1.0 / obs. 6818147

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 17 botanical countries

Native distribution of Nitraria retusa, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Egypt	EGY
Libya	LBY
Mauritania	MTN
Morocco	MOR
Senegal	SEN
Sudan-South Sudan	SUD
Tunisia	TUN
Western Sahara	WSA
Iran	IRN	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Iraq	IRQ
Kuwait	KUW
Lebanon-Syria	LBS
Palestine	PAL
Saudi Arabia	SAU
Sinai	SIN
Pakistan	PAK	ASIA-TROPICAL

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 140 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	6.1 °C	9.0 °C	15.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	25.5 °C	35.5 °C	46.2 °C
Annual rainfall	6 mm	107 mm	384 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	0 mm	0 mm	8 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 140 research-grade observations of Nitraria retusa that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 6 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Berberis africana Hebenstr. & Ludw. ex Schult. & Schult.f.
Nitraria schoberi var. faurei Maire
Nitraria senegalensis Poir.
Nitraria sericea Jaub. & Spach
Nitraria tridentata Desf.
Peganum retusum Forssk.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.