Invasive species: The Prosopis juliflora variety of the mesquite is so hardy that it can crowd out other native plants, as has happened in the Thar Desert in India. - Forest & Kim Starr
A plan to reintroduce native species battles with an invasive leguminous plant grown by a maharajah in the 1930s.
LONG after a 19th-century English watercolourist painted the massive outcrop of barren volcanic rocks on which the formidable Jodhpur fort is perched, a modernising maharajah went up in his two-seater Tiger Moth plane to scatter bagfuls of mesquite seed in order to green his desert kingdom in Rajasthan, India.
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