 This scruffy-looking plant, and even boring on ugly, is called greasewood. Now, early settlers to Wyoming quickly understood where this grew in abundance, crops would not. Greasewood is a very tough Wyoming native that grows where almost nothing else can grow, on alkaline or salty flats and flood plains. Greasewood is thorny. It loses its leaves and appears dead in the winter. However, it starts to grow again in early spring and can reach a height of seven feet or more. And greasewood is extraordinarily drought tolerant. Greasewood is moderately toxic to livestock if they eat too much of its leaves, but browsing it has kept a lot of Wyoming sheep and cattle alive in the winter. Many small wildlife species including jackrabbits, porcupines, prairie dogs, and ground squirrels feed on greasewood. Indians, and probably a many a sheepher, use the wood for fuel and digging sticks. Experience has shown that if you remove greasewood, you may well get something worse to grow or nothing at all. Whether you find greasewood in its habitat beautiful or not, it is a Wyoming native and needs to be appreciated as such. This has been Tom Hill for the University of Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service, Exploring the Nature of Wyoming.