跳至主要內容 / Skip to content
Zhu's Plant Journal
The swollen stem of a desert rose
A swollen stem; it looks as if the skin is about to split.

Desert rose (Adenium)

Adenium

Adenium Caudex plants

Compiled reference

Background

The desert rose belongs to the genus Adenium in the family Apocynaceae. This page goes only as far as the genus (Adenium spp.): my plants are seed-grown, the labels are no longer complete, and the variety cannot be confirmed.

POWO accepts 6 species in the genus, native to tropical and southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.

They are succulent shrubs or trees, 0.2 to 6 m tall, with the lower trunk sometimes up to 1 m across and clear or white latex. The leaves are alternate and clustered at the tips of the branchlets. The fruit is a pair of oblong, hairy follicles holding many seeds, each seed with a tuft of hairs at both ends.

Sources

  1. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — Plants of the World Online (POWO)： Adenium Roem. & Schult.（含 General information：Flora of Tropical East Africa 2002 形態描述） Accessed: 2026-09-16
  2. 臺灣物種名錄 TaiCOL： Adenium 沙漠玫瑰屬 Accessed: 2026-09-16

Background last reviewed: 2026-09-20

My own observations

Cultivation

My desert roses

I sowed these around 2023. They used to sit under shade cloth, and once I moved them outside into the open they kept getting fatter. The full record is in the note Desert roses I grew from seed.

Related articles

Related notes