Type: Flowering Plant / Deciduous
Exposure: Full Sun
Water Use: Medium
Mature Size: 3’ x 3’
This airy plant bursts with delicate white and pink flowers whirling off of a central stem. In fact, one of its cultivars is called “whirling butterflies” due to the nature of the plant. The graceful stems are tall, narrow and fan out in a whirl that blows in the breeze. This airy plant flowers from June through September and brings a unique spray of flowers to the garden.
The jujube is just one of those trees that is extra! Extra fruitful, extra nutritious, extra hardy, extra beautiful. This medium sized tree comes in 400 varieties, many of which are being cultivated and taking root in Albuquerque.
The jujube tree, often called Chinese date, has been cultivated for thousands of years around the world, in Albuquerque for nearly 60 years and in the panhandle of Texas since 1875. Its small abundant fruits are high in fiber, vitamin C, potassium, antioxidants and phenolic compounds and have been used to support nervous system, cardiac and digestive health. Medicinally, it is used as a tonic sweetener in many supportive Chinese herbal remedies.
The fruit can be eaten raw, dried or cooked. Fresh from the tree, when they’re mature and a luscious mahogany brown, they have a crunchy refreshing taste, like a cross between an apple and a date. As they dry, they become sweeter and chewy. Dried, they are delicious in oatmeal, cookies, trail mix or anywhere you would use dried fruit. They make an excellent chai — just boil dried pieces with other ingredients, letting the earthy sweet flavor complement ginger, cinnamon, cardamom, pepper and other traditional chai ingredients. You also can find recipes from Korea, China, Vietnam, India, Italy and many Persian cultures that incorporate the jujube for both sweet and savory dishes.
The fruit is very easy to dry and, in fact, many that you miss harvesting will dry right on the tree. However, we do recommend bringing them inside to dry and cutting the pits out before drying so they are easier to eat and enjoy down the road. If you have a dehydrator, that will speed the process, but they will also dry if you place them on cookie sheets in a spare room, on top of a shed in the sun or even in a car and let our New Mexico dry air work its magic. Jujubes don’t bruise and spoil quickly like other stone fruits, so windfalls and bird-pecked fruits don’t make a mess and are still usable.
We love edible landscapes, so we’re naturally drawn to these fabulous trees. But even if you aren’t looking for food, the jujube is a wonderfully hardy tree for Albuquerque. This tough specimen hails from the buckthorn family, Rhamnaceae, and will grow in USDA hardiness zones 6-11, which is an extraordinary range for any tree! At the moment, Albuquerque is generally zone 7, but as we face climate disruption, landscapers and planners are encouraging planting with an eye to zone 8 or 9 so our shade and habitat trees can withstand increasing heat. Jujubes are deeply rooted and can tolerate drought and saline and alkaline soils. Once established they can survive with small amounts of water, though a strategic watering schedule will increase your yield. Because they’re so drought tolerant, we don’t recommend planting a veggie garden under them or they’ll drink up all the water intended for your zucchini. They do well in full sun or light shade. They can handle sustained days and weeks of 100 degree plus heat, 23 below zero in winter and anything in between. They must have a frost to produce fruit, which isn’t a problem here. Jujubes do sucker quite a bit from their roots, and this rootstock, if allowed to sprout, produces very small, almost inedible fruits that are mostly pit. So, we do suggest being vigilant in cutting down the root sprouts as they appear.
Jujubes make a beautiful addition to any landscape. They have an elegant zig zag branch growth pattern and bright green, shiny oval leaves that can even withstand severe hail. They can be trained to a traditional tree structure or allowed to be a little wild and shrubby. They provide cool shade and habitat for birds, pollinators and other wildlife. Speaking of wildlife, one of us has a friend whose small dog Kipper grabs himself a couple from the ground during ripening season, carrying them happily to his bed to snack on … he’s not wildlife, but that little dog seems to love a jujube even above his biscuit treats. These trees benefit from cross pollination so plant yourself two of these beauties!
Planting trees not only gives you the riches of your tree, but it is also a love letter to the future. As gardeners who are tending land and each other in the midst of climate chaos, we have the opportunity to cultivate healing, repair and hope. With every tree we plant, we can try to leave our small patch of earth a little better than how we found it — cooled with shade, brightened with birdsong and providing nutritious food via a resilient, prized and giving tree. The next time you’re sitting in your garden, allow yourself to dream of a future where someone is harvesting jujubes and appreciating the ancestors who cultivated and left these sweet trees for them.
Learn more about specific types of gardening here:
Food Forests a Prehistoric Agroecosystem for your Backyard
A Valuable Bosque Understory Shrub Clove Currants for the Birds, Bees and Butterfles
Trees are especially important in arid, urban environments like Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. They provide shade, mitigate urban heat, reduce greenhouse gasses and air pollution, and create wildlife habitat, among many other benefits. All trees, even climate-resilient and drought tolerant species, need to be watered adequately.
It’s worth the investment to keep our mature trees healthy. The mature trees on your property are worth much more than the cost of your treasured appliances and, yes, even more than your roof. Keeping our trees healthy and happy over their lifetime is a minimal investment and a valuable contribution to our community urban forest.
In Albuquerque, we tend to overwater our lawns and underwater our trees. It’s important to understand the basics of how best to water trees. For instance, a tree has two different main types of roots. The feeder roots lie within the first 6-24”of the ground, and the stabilizer roots can be at least 3’ deep You may think your trees’ roots can reach the water table, but you should think again — most of Albuquerque has a water table between 20 and 150 feet’ deep. Your roots are never getting that deep.
Due to the importance of our urban forest and how many people are seeking guidance on how to water their trees, the Bernalillo County Water Conservation Program, and Let’s Plant Albuquerque, partners collaborated to create this How to Build an Efficient Tree Watering System guide and the associated workshops.
The tree irrigation system is inexpensive, flexible, easy to install and long-lasting. It uses drip irrigation attached to your hose bib and can be easily expanded as your tree matures.
When assembling your system there are a few key parts to consider:
The watering guidance for the system was developed to not under or over water most trees in Albuquerque. However, irrigation is highly dependent on site conditions such as soil type and microclimate as well as the species of tree. This guidance is meant to be a rule of thumb or starting point, and adjustments should be made based on the local conditions and tree species.
Below are some of the factors that should be considered in generating a watering schedule for your yard:
Other articles that might be of interest:
The Balancing Act of Watering Trees in the Fall and Winter
How to make a Tree Watering System for your established and mature trees
Tips to Keep Mature Trees Healthy
Type: Deciduous
Exposure: Sun/Shade
Water Use: Medium
Mature Size: 8”x2’
Just as its name declares, this perennial brings a little bit of white brilliance to the summer garden. It thrives well in shade and in part sun, thereby spreading and filling in a lot of space. The name doesn’t tell the entire story because this plant is also admired for its delicate silvery leaves. It makes an excellent ground cover for dry areas. The leaves spread a mat of foliage from which the flower stems rise. It also will cascade over rocks and walls.
Nothing adds the same quality and value to a landscape as a healthy mature tree. The benefits include cooler outdoor spaces, cooler homes, aesthetic appeal, carbon capture, stormwater mitigation and more. There are some key things to think about when it comes to keeping your big old tree happy.
What are the key parts of the tree and what do they do? All the parts are important, many are redundant, and how they play together really matters. The redundant parts are leaves, small branches and small roots underground. While critical for tree health, the tree can lose some of any of these without suffering fatal damage; the tree will, with time and to the best of its ability, replace those lost parts with new growth.
The fine roots explore for water and minerals in the soil, hopefully with the help of symbiotic soil fungi. Only the youngest, smallest roots (those that haven’t even grown bark yet) take in water, like tiny sponges. These roots grow when and where soil moisture is available and die off when the soil gets too dry. Trees may have several flushes of absorbing roots growing and dying back over a season. Once in the roots, water moves up successively larger roots as it travels toward the stem.
There is one part of the tree that is not redundant. This is the root crown, or root flare, where the ropy wood of the root system changes into the blocky wood of the stem. The happiest, healthiest trees have a strong root flare visible above the soil line. These root shoulders act like buttress supports for the huge load of wood and foliage being acted on by gravity and wind.
As water moves up the trunk, it travels in sapwood (or xylem) — living wood just underneath the bark layers. Outside the sapwood is a thin ring called the cambium, cells that make new cells that make new cells … for as long as the tree lives. Outside that layer is the inner bark (or phloem), a green spongy layer with many functions, including moving sugars and other metabolites from the leaves to wherever they need to go. These three layers — xylem, cambium and phloem — constitute the “living rind” of the tree and are protected by the dead but intact outer bark layers. The central wood, or heartwood, is dead but intact as well.
Leaves out at the end of the small branches are busy converting sunlight energy into stored chemical energy in the form of sugars. These are then used as fuel and as building blocks for the tree to power its ongoing life functions and make the complex chemicals needed to do so.
What harms a tree? Things that harm the root system (soil compaction, drought, heat, chemicals), things that damage the root flare (stem girdling roots, mowers, construction), things that damage the living rind (wire girdling, kids with hatchets, vehicles) and things that damage leaves (over pruning, certain herbicides, heat). There are feedback loops, especially between the roots and the leaves. Root damage that reduces water uptake leads to leaves making less sugar which means less resource to grow new roots. Herbicide damage that deforms leaves leads to less sugar feeding root function as well as less pull on the water, both leading to less water and nutrient uptake going back to the leaves.
So, here’s what you do: Avoid those harmful things!
Other articles that might be of interest:
The Balancing Act of Watering Trees in the Fall and Winter
How to make a Tree Watering System for your established and mature trees
Tips to Keep Mature Trees Healthy