Humid Chaco

A colorful warm-climate screen and hedge palette for frost-light gardens: flowering shrubs, scrambling color, wildlife nectar, and dry-season structure.

The Belizian pine savannas ecoregion lies almost entirely in Belize along the northwestern Caribbean coast, with only a few very small tracts reaching into neighboring Mexico and Guatemala. Its signature habitat is open savanna dominated by Caribbean pine (Pinus caribaea), woven into a mosaic that also includes calabash tree, white oak species, nanche, and everglades (Paurotis) palm, with closed pine forests in the premontane interior near the Maya Mountains. The climate is tropical monsoon (Koppen Am), warm through the year with a pronounced dry season and roughly 2,000 mm of annual rainfall in the wetter premontane zone. Fire shapes the landscape here: the Caribbean pine depends on periodic low-intensity wildfires to regenerate, and the savannas are the stronghold of the endangered yellow-headed Amazon parrot, now largely restricted to this region and adjacent parts of Mexico and Guatemala. For gardeners, several ornamental natives belong to this flora, including the calabash tree (Crescentia), nanche (Byrsonima crassifolia), and the everglades palm (Acoelorraphe).

The Beni savanna, also mapped as the Llanos de Moxos, is a tropical lowland savanna that lies in the southwestern Amazon basin, almost entirely within northern Bolivia's Beni Department, with small extensions into Brazil along the Iténez River and into Peru's Pampas del Heath. It forms a mosaic of seasonally flooded grassland and wetland threaded with forest islands and riverside gallery forest, where sedges and grasses give way to trumpet trees (Tabebuia ochracea), grugru palm, and stands of Attalea and Acrocomia palms in better-drained ground. The climate is tropical with a pronounced wet season from roughly December to May, when rains and snowmelt from the nearby Andes flood up to half the low-lying terrain for months at a time. It is one of South America's largest savanna complexes and the flagship home of the critically endangered, endemic blue-throated macaw (Ara glaucogularis), alongside hundreds of recorded bird species, though cattle grazing and seasonal burning press on its habitats. For gardeners, the showy native trumpet trees of the genus Tabebuia are familiar flowering ornamentals well suited to warm, seasonally wet climates.

The Campos Rupestres montane savanna is a high-elevation Brazilian ecoregion concentrated along the ancient Espinhaço Range, stretching from northern Bahia south through Minas Gerais, with scattered enclaves in the Chapada Diamantina, Serra da Canastra, and Serra do Caparaó. Known locally as "rock fields" (campo rupestre), it is a discontinuous mosaic of grasslands, shrublands, and quartzite rocky outcrops that threads through the Cerrado, Atlantic Forest, and Caatinga biomes, with vegetation dominated by the families Velloziaceae, Eriocaulaceae, Cyperaceae, and Poaceae. The climate brings dry winters and wet summers paired with strong winds and intense solar irradiance, and plants here grow on nutrient-poor, extremely shallow and acidic soils, adapting with waxy leaf coatings, protective hairs, and fire-resistant rolled leaves. It is an exceptional center of plant endemism-roughly 30 percent of its flora is found nowhere else, and within the Velloziaceae and Eriocaulaceae about 70 percent of species are endemic-yet it remains a threatened ecoregion, with only about 26 percent under protection against mining, eucalyptus plantations, and plant extraction. For gardeners, its rocky outcrops are a natural home to orchids and bromeliads adapted to lean, fast-draining substrates.

The Cerrado is the largest and biologically richest savanna in South America, covering central Brazil and reaching into northeastern Paraguay and eastern Bolivia across plateaus generally between 500 and 1,700 meters in elevation. Rather than uniform grassland, it forms a shifting mosaic that grades from open campo through wooded savanna to the tall, nearly closed woodland known as cerradao, growing on nutrient-poor, well-drained soils and threaded with gallery forests; characteristic woody plants include the pequi tree, Qualea grandiflora, and the trumpet tree Tabebuia ochracea. Its climate is tropical and strongly seasonal, with a pronounced dry season during the southern winter, average annual rainfall of roughly 1,250 to 2,000 millimeters, and mean temperatures around 20 to 26 degrees Celsius. The region is extraordinarily diverse, holding on the order of 10,400 vascular plant species with endemism reaching about 50 percent among plants, and the maned wolf serves as its flagship animal. Much of the Cerrado has been converted to farmland, and the expansion of agribusiness, especially soybean cultivation, remains the primary threat to its native vegetation. For gardeners, the native Tabebuia trumpet trees are among the genera from this ecoregion already valued as flowering ornamentals.

The Clipperton Island shrub and grasslands ecoregion is confined to a single tiny coral atoll administered by France, lying in the eastern Pacific roughly 965 kilometers southwest of mainland Mexico and recognized as the only coral island in that ocean. Its vegetation is sparse and low, dominated by spiny grass and thickets together with creeping morning glories (Ipomoea) and scattered groves of coconut palm, the cover often standing barely 30 centimeters high after land crabs repeatedly reset the plant community. The climate is tropical, with average temperatures between about 20 and 32 degrees Celsius and frequent tropical storms passing the island. Despite its bleak greenery, the atoll teems with life, supporting thousands of breeding seabirds, including the world's largest masked booby colony, alongside millions of the bright-orange Clipperton land crab that gives the ecoregion its flagship species. The atoll currently has no formal legal protection, leaving this isolated ecosystem reliant on its sheer remoteness.

The Dry Chaco is a vast semi-arid lowland in the heart of South America, spanning northwestern Argentina, western Paraguay, and southeastern Bolivia (extending into a small part of Brazil), east of the Andes. Its landscape is a mosaic of savanna and thorn forest, signatured by quebracho hardwoods-red quebracho (Schinopsis lorentzii) and white quebracho (Aspidosperma quebracho-blanco)-alongside the slow-growing palo santo (Bulnesia sarmientoi), prickly-pear and giant columnar cacti, and an understory of bromeliads. Lying in the rain shadow of the central Andes, it endures intense sun, a long dry season, and some of the highest temperatures on the continent, with rainfall roughly around 865 mm a year. The ecoregion is a stronghold of arid-land endemism-home to the once-thought-extinct Chacoan peccary and numerous armadillo species-but it is under heavy pressure, having lost an estimated 20.2% of its forest cover between 2000 and 2019 to ranching and cropland. For gardeners in hot, dry climates, the native algarrobo (Prosopis alba) is a prized shade tree well suited to such conditions.