Tamarix chinensis Seeds | Chinese Tamarisk
LATIN NAME: Tamarix chinensis
COMMON NAME: Chinese Tamarisk
Plant Profile
Chinese tamarisk is a large shrub or small tree, usually two to five metres tall and only occasionally taller, with a crown that starts narrow and opens into a rounded, slightly weeping head. The bark on older wood is dark and rough; the young shoots are slender, reddish brown and flexible, and they arch outward in long, whippy growths that give the plant its fine, feathery outline. The leaves are the oddity. They are reduced to tiny scales, one to three millimetres long, overlapping and clasping the stem so completely that the shoot looks like a green cord rather than a leafy branch.
Flowering happens twice in a good year, which is one of the distinctions between this species and its western relative. The first flush comes in spring on wood made the previous season, in slender racemes of pale pink; the second comes in summer and autumn on the current year’s shoots, often more heavily. Each flower is tiny, with five petals and five stamens, and the combined effect is a soft pink haze over the whole bush. The fruits are small capsules that split to release seed carrying a tuft of hair. The species is native to the coastal flats, riverbanks and saline depressions of northern and eastern China, from Liaoning around to Jiangsu and inland into the dry northwest, and it has been planted so widely for shelter that its original range is hard to pin down.
Science & Biotechnology
The salt glands are the reason the plant appears so often in physiological literature. Tamarisk leaves carry specialised secretory cells that actively excrete sodium and chloride onto the leaf surface, where they form visible white crusts that are washed off by rain or fall to the ground beneath the bush. This is not tolerance in the passive sense; it is an energy-consuming process, and it lets the plant keep its internal ion balance while growing in soils where the osmotic potential would otherwise stop water uptake altogether. Work on the species has mapped the gland structure, the ion fluxes involved, and the way the excreted salt alters the soil around the root zone.
The genus is also a taxonomic tangle. Species hybridise readily, and the group is divided on the basis of leaf width, the number of stamens and the timing of flowering, characters that overlap in the field. Tamarix chinensis is one of the parents of the aggressive hybrid swarm that has spread through river systems in the southwestern United States, where it crosses with Tamarix ramosissima, and this has made the Chinese species a subject of invasion genetics as well as of pure botany. Studies of its wood anatomy, its response to flooding and its clonal spread by root suckers all feed into management decisions in those invaded landscapes.
Uses & Benefits
In Chinese medicine the young twigs and leaves are used as Cheng Liu, a warm, acrid herb given to bring out a rash in measles and to relieve wind-cold with fever. It is a specific, old use, and it has largely fallen out of practice in cities where measles is rare. The plant’s more important modern role is in land management. It is planted as a windbreak on coastal sand and along irrigation channels, where its salt tolerance and deep roots hold banks together and shelter crops from salt-laden wind. The flexible young stems are woven into baskets and hurdles, and the wood is used for small turnery and fuel.
Tamarisk honeydew is collected in some parts of its range, though the best-known manna tamarisk is a different species altogether. In the garden the plant is useful for the worst ground: dry, salty, windswept sites where little else will hold. It responds well to hard pruning and can be kept as a dense hedge or a coppiced shrub, and it will tolerate both drought and short periods of flooding. It is not a plant for a rich border, where it becomes loose and untidy; it belongs on a bank, a boundary or a seaside garden, where its fine texture and pink summer haze are seen against the sky.
Growing from Seed
Tamarisk seed is almost dust, and it loses viability within weeks, so the first rule is to sow it fresh. There is no point storing it. Fill a tray with a fine, firmed mix, water it to saturation, and scatter the seed on the wet surface without covering it at all, because light and direct contact with moisture are both required. Cover the tray with glass and keep it warm and humid. Germination can begin in two or three days and will be uneven; the seedlings are tiny and slow at first, and they must not be allowed to dry out for a single day.
Prick them out when they are two or three centimetres high, into a gritty mix, and grow them on in full light. Cuttings are far easier than seed and root readily in summer from half-ripened shoots in a closed case. Plant out in autumn or spring into full sun and any soil that drains, including sand and saline ground. Water for the first summer only. Once established the shrub needs nothing but an occasional hard prune if it becomes leggy, and it will coppice back from the base if cut to the ground.
Our Take
This is a shrub for difficult ground, and it should be judged on that basis rather than against border plants. Given salt, wind and sun it makes a dense, fine-textured screen with two seasons of pink, and it asks for nothing afterwards.
Related Reading
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