An exploration of the peelu tree's unique adaptations to saline soil and its vital role in desert ecosystems, as highlighted in 'The Trees of My Country'.
New Delhi, India Aug 1, 2026 ALN: We go looking for the birds that have come from afar for the berries. The cold January dawn breaks along a dusty, smoky horizon in orange-red, paling to light blue. A factory belches smoke into the skies over the open landscape we drive through, here in the district of Kutch in northern Gujarat. We pass fields of castor, dry plants along dry furrows, clumps of the ubiquitous American mesquite, wires criss-crossing between large electric pylons, one carrying a perched Long-legged Buzzard morosely scanning the miles of field and fallow from horizon to horizon. A Montagu’s Harrier beats low over the fields, eyes intent on the ground. Filling the air, the soft chirp of larks and sparrows, the cackle of francolins, the chatter of bulbuls. But no sign of the bird we have come to see.
Further down the road, in a line of trees tangled with mesquite at the edge of a power station, a dozen or so grey birds drop into the foliage. We stop to watch. Among the shining green leaves and twigs, they are already picking away at the small, bright red berries with their lance-like beaks. Slim, grey, bulbul-sized birds with black and white on the wing feathers, the males sporting a dark grey Zorro mask wrapped around the head, the birds are busy at their toothsome breakfast. Hypocolius! This peculiar bird, the only one in its eponymous genus, Hypocolius, and family Hypocoliidae, is sometimes called a shrike-bulbul but is neither shrike nor bulbul, and is instead related to another peculiar bird, the Bohemian Waxwing, a rare vagrant to parts of northern India. The Hypocolius breed in the arid lands of the Middle East and swing south and south-eastwards for the winter, which also brings them to this extreme western corner of India. They come right in time to feast on the fruits of this equally peculiar tree that grows in the arid and saline soils of Western India.
Fewer can grow where the soil contains not just high levels of salts, but are clayey and sodic, with a high concentration of sodium ions, which impedes the soil’s permeability to water, causing waterlogging when wet and crusting when dry. And even fewer trees can take all that in open, exposed lands subject to extremes of climate: freezing cold winters, paucity of rain and freshwater, and scorching summers. The superpowers of the Salvadora trees enable them to tackle all that.
Two species of Salvadora are found across India: the peelu or meetha jaal, S persica, and the bada [big] peelu or khaara jaal, S oleoides. The name peelu (or pīlu), strangely enough, is likely rooted in the ancient Dravidian pīl or pal, for tooth. Early Dravidian texts also refer to elephants, with their characteristic and unmistakable tusks, as “pīlu”, “pella”, “palla”, and so on. In Indic languages, the name “peelu” ascribed to Salvadora persica is likely due to the widespread use of the trees’ twigs as a toothbrush. As the Hypocolius gorged on the peelu’s berries, I imagined thousands of people across northwestern India and westwards to Arabia, beginning their mornings chewing on the twigs (also known as miswak) from the peelu tree.
Peelu and bada peelu are characteristic of desert and arid lands, although they tend to grow where they are more likely to get some water, such as at the edge of watercourses or rocky depressions, in saline creeks and salt marshes. Thus, they manage to stay evergreen, although the leaves may thin out in the driest months. The peelu ranges from Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the region of the Indus to the Aravallis, and to drier parts of the Deccan to the south. They also hug the edges of tidal creeks in Western India.
The bada peelu is, if anything, even more picky in its habits and is restricted in its range to the arid western parts of India, including the very saline, stark, and vast salt marshes of the Great Rann of Kutch. The peelu and bada peelu can be told apart easily by their leaves: the former has lance-shaped leaves the size of a thumbprint, while the latter has long, thin leaves, like those of olive trees (and hence the name oleoides), like a skinny and pointy little finger.
Some are almost shrub-like. Mature trees develop stout, gnarled, and often twisted trunks that support branches whose extremities droop almost to the ground, a characteristic shared by the bada peelu. In the harsh, open landscape of the desert and places like the Great Rann, the spreading, drooping canopy of these trees provides shelter and shade to antelope, like the chinkara, and to livestock, including stodgy buffaloes and large-horned Kankrej cattle herded by the Maldhari people of this region.
Like the Hypocolius, many other peculiar and endangered wildlife species occur alongside the peelu and bada peelu. Both tree species range across characteristic open natural ecosystems that are imperilled due to faulty policies and destructive development. In the Thar desert and grasslands of Rajasthan and Gujarat, species such as the Great Indian Bustard, now reduced to fewer than 150 individuals in the wild, face a multitude of threats. These include irrigation by the Indira Gandhi Canal that is pushing out native vegetation such as the peelu and bada peelu trees (which are adapted to drier tracts) and bringing in many non-native species. In the guise of dune stabilisation or increasing tree cover, foresters have planted monocultures of non-native trees such as the Israeli babool (Vachellia tortilis, earlier Acacia tortilis), instead of more suitable native species. Further, mega wind and solar-power projects are destroying large areas of natural habitat while their thousands of kilometres of powerlines kill birds like bustards, cranes, flamingos, and raptors that collide with the wires.
In Gujarat, in the still-vast salt marshes of the Great Rann and Little Rann of Kutch and grasslands like the Banni, reputed to be one of India’s largest grassland ecosystems, native vegetation such as with Salvadora trees, succulent-like Suaeda shrubs, and aridland vegetation with plants like kair and khejdi are receding against a tide of invasion by American mesquite that now covers tens of thousands of hectares.
As for the unique dunes and arid land vegetation of the roee and the forests of the Aravalli hills, their fate is tied to their proximity to urban centres such as Jaipur, Gurgaon, and New Delhi. Plans to “develop” the Aravalli by reclassifying forests as revenue lands, mining for rocks and minerals from the geologically ancient hills, ploughing highways through and fragmenting the habitat, and burying them under large-scale housing and industrial construction projects, all threaten to destroy what little remains of the natural ecosystems in this remarkable landscape.
If cities can be the engines of destruction, their citizens can be engines of restoration, too. In Kishan Bagh in Jaipur, Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park in Jodhpur, and the Aravalli Biodiversity Parks in New Delhi and Gurgaon, citizen and civil society groups and restoration practitioners have carefully restored and continue to conserve native vegetation. Among them, many Salvadora trees, too, find a home. Each year, they put out their little, luscious berries that bring the birds who do their part in spreading the seeds and ensuring the survival of the toothsome trees.
Excerpted with permission from The Trees of My Country: A Natural History of India in 50 Trees, TR Shankar Raman, illustrated by Manali Patil, Aleph Book Company.
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