Rann of Kutch seasonal salt marsh

A frost-free edible palette for humid subtropical and tropical gardens: fruiting canopy, understory crops, edible roots, and container-friendly patio plants.

The Amur meadow steppe stretches across two sections of the middle Amur River valley, straddling the Russian Far East (Amur Oblast and Khabarovsk Krai) and northeastern China (Heilongjiang province). Because the land is a flat floodplain on alluvial soil with a high water table and frequent flooding, it has remained largely free of forest, instead supporting extensive wetlands of bogs and grasslands; wet meadows are dominated by reed grasses (Calamagrostis) alongside many members of the parsley family (Apiaceae) and Spiraea shrubs, with Mongolian oak and Daurian birch also present. The climate is humid continental of the cool-summer subtype (Koppen Dwb), with long, cold winters and short, cool summers. The region is a stronghold for threatened wildlife, including the red-crowned crane, Oriental stork, and Blakiston's eagle-owl, while the kaluga sturgeon serves as the ecoregion's flagship species. Much of it has been converted to cropland and only a small fraction is protected, within reserves such as Khingan and Bolshekhekhtsirsky.

The Bohai Sea saline meadow is a Flooded Grasslands and Savannas ecoregion in the Palearctic realm, confined to China, where it rims the crescent-shaped shore of Bohai Bay on the northwest of the Bohai Sea. It occupies the actively growing coastal deltas built where the Yellow River (Huang He) and the Luan River discharge their heavy sediment loads into the sea. Vegetation grades seaward from interior grasslands of cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica) through salt-tolerant meadows of seepweed (Suaeda) to bare intertidal mudflats, with former freshwater reed and sedge marshes now largely converted to rice paddies and aquaculture. The climate is humid continental with hot summers and cold, dry winters (Koppen Dwa), marked by large seasonal temperature swings. These saline meadows and mudflats are a critical stopover on the East Asian-Australasian Flyway; the Oriental stork is the flagship species, and the ecoregion is one of only a few breeding sites worldwide for Saunders's gull, though it remains under heavy pressure from coastal development.

The Cuban wetlands ecoregion blankets the lowland floodplains along Cuba's northern and southern Caribbean shores, with the vast Zapata Swamp of Matanzas and Havana provinces forming its largest expanse and reaching across the Gulf of Batabano. Its habitats grade from permanently and seasonally flooded grasslands dominated by sawgrass and southern cattail into taller swamp forests, with floating aquatics such as fragrant water lily in deeper water and mangroves fringing the seaward margins. As a Neotropical flooded grasslands and savannas system, it is shaped by a tropical wet-and-dry rhythm in which marshy ground sits submerged for much of the year. The region shelters the critically endangered Cuban crocodile, its flagship species, alongside endemic birds including the Zapata wren and Zapata rail, and is classified as critical or endangered despite reserves like the Cienaga de Zapata Biosphere Reserve. For wetland and water gardeners, native genera here include true water lilies and the architectural sawgrass and cattail of permanently wet ground.

The East African halophytics ecoregion covers the saline soda lakes of the eastern arm of the Great Rift Valley, spanning northern Tanzania and southern Kenya, and takes in Lake Natron, Lake Eyasi, and Lake Manyara on the Tanzanian side along with Lake Magadi in Kenya. Resting on volcanic lava and ash that weather into deep, sodium-rich soils, the lakes are largely devoid of rooted (macrophytic) vegetation; instead they teem with blue-green algae, chiefly Spirulina, while only a few salt-loving halophytic plants persist on the alkaline soils fringing the water. The climate is semi-arid, with erratic rainfall concentrated between December and May, a long dry season, and daytime temperatures that frequently climb above 40 degrees Celsius alongside high evaporation. Despite waters so hot and alkaline that most life is excluded, the ecoregion is globally important for the lesser flamingo, its flagship species, with Lake Natron serving as the single most important breeding site for the bird, and it also shelters endemic salt-tolerant alkaline tilapia in its hot-spring margins.

The Enriquillo Wetlands ecoregion occupies a low-lying depression in southwestern Hispaniola, straddling both the Dominican Republic and Haiti and centered on a chain of lakes that includes hypersaline Lake Enriquillo, the largest lake in the Caribbean and one whose surface sits roughly 44 meters below sea level. Wetland margins are dominated by salt-tolerant plants such as buttonwood mangrove (Conocarpus erectus), cattails (Typha domingensis), and saltwort (Batis maritima), grading into surrounding dry subtropical thorn forest with guayacán, almácigo, bayahonda, and yarey and Palma cacheo palms. The climate is arid for the tropics, with low annual precipitation in the range of 400 to 500 millimeters and warm water temperatures from about 24 to 29 degrees Celsius, while elevated, sulfurous salinity shapes the lake itself. The wetlands support the island's largest population of the American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus), the critically endangered Ricord's iguana found only around Lake Enriquillo, the rhinoceros iguana, and the endemic Hispaniolan slider turtle, with American flamingos and roseate spoonbills among the birds, and three IUCN category II national parks protect parts of the region. For gardeners in similarly hot, dry settings, native drought-hardy genera of this landscape such as Guaiacum (guayacán) and Bursera (almácigo) point to plants suited to arid, saline-influenced ground.

The Etosha Pan halophytics ecoregion lies entirely within Etosha National Park in northern Namibia, encompassing a vast saline depression of roughly 4,850 square kilometers that forms part of the Cuvelai-Etosha Basin and is the remnant of a large inland Pliocene lake. This is the largest pan system in Namibia, mostly dry cracked clay that floods with a thin, heavily salted sheet of water after good rains. Vegetation is sparse and salt-tolerant: the pan surface is colonized by grasses such as Sporobolus spicatus that flush quickly after rain, while dense mopane woodland frames the surrounding margins. The climate is harsh and strongly seasonal, with a mean annual rainfall near 430 millimeters falling mostly in late summer, three distinct seasons (hot and wet, cool and dry, hot and dry), and temperatures swinging from below freezing in winter to over 45 degrees Celsius in summer. The pan is a Ramsar wetland of international importance and a crucial breeding ground, drawing up to 1.1 million flamingos in flood years alongside its flagship great white pelican, and the park supports one of the largest black rhino populations in the world.