A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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smoke tree
Smoke tree names two very different plants. The Eurasian one is a shrub whose spent flower clusters expand into a haze of fine pink-gray filaments that surround the whole plant like smoke. The American one is a desert tree of Sonoran washes, nearly leafless, made of pale gray-blue thorny twigs so fine that from a distance the whole crown reads as a puff of smoke standing in the sand.
Etymology
Both names are English and both were arrived at independently for the same visual reason. The desert species is Psorothamnus spinosus, and its Spanish name, corona de Cristo, comes at it from an entirely different direction, seeing the thorns rather than the haze.
Notes
The desert smoke tree can only germinate after its seed has been battered. The coat is so hard that it has to be scarified by tumbling in a flash flood, so seedlings appear only in washes and only after a flood has moved the sand, which is why the trees stand in lines down a drainage and never on the banks. Seeds carried too far downstream fail; the successful ones travel a short distance and lodge.