Vegetation Cover Appearance
The geographic location of Kish on Iran's southern coasts is a narrow strip of the world's dry and tropical dryland vegetation. The island's particular geographic-climatic situation, located in the warm shallow waters of the Strait of Hormuz, results in the island's poor vegetation cover. Low precipitation, evaporation several times the annual rainfall, and high heat, for most days and months of the year, make the island's climate arid, semi-desert, and desert. The absence of topographic features, the thin soil layer spread over the hard coral substrate of the island, dryness and heat are the main characteristics of the island's sparse vegetation patterns.
The island's green cover includes two groups: herbaceous annuals and perennials and semi-woody and woody plants. The leaf fall of the island's plants begins at the start of the hot, dry summer season.
The island's herbaceous growths usually gradually appear in late Aban, creating a green appearance on the dry and gray-burnt lands under the island's summer sun.
The island's growths gradually dry out with the start of Farvardin and Ordibehesht, leaving a yellow and gray background of them across the island. Within this background, patches of green and silvery-green perennial grasses are often seen throughout the summer until early autumn.
Some of the island's annual herbs include various cereals, calendula, sesuvium, matthiola, milk thistle, alfalfa, wild fenugreek, plantago species, pelargoniums, suicides (tatorre), chameleon (afteb parast), dock (rumex), plantains and so on.
Perennial herbs include numerous grasses, convolvuluses, alliums, plants of the parsley family, astragali, jagns, abutilon, charkhoha, yellow alfalfa, various legumes, halophytes and so on.
The island's short shrubs and bushy plants include: wolf-thorn, ocradenus, ephedra, nile (nil), some cannas, some alliums, halophytes, tamarisks and others. The dominant native and natural trees of the island include kehr (Prosopis), zygophyllum (kenar), relatively tall tamarisks, Bengal fig, lombo (three-breasted), bamber, loz (garum zangi) and girt which have been planted since long ago and are almost naturalized, kert and some other acacias which, along with Pakistani kehr and eucalyptus, coconut palm and other planted trees, are present.
Other herbaceous plants under the shade of the palms and other irrigated trees where the soil has sufficient moisture remain until the end of the growing season and create a considerable cover beneath the palm groves.
In summer, when heat and dryness are very severe, especially in drought years, in addition to the perennial bushes, the island's trees and shrubs usually also lose their aerial green parts and appear dry and gray. In late Azar, especially after the usual rains of that month, green buds begin to sprout on the lower and last year's dried parts of the bushes, and soon the bushes bear a profusion of dry and green branches. With the sprouting of annual herbs across the island, the island's spring nature suddenly turns green and springlike. In low-rain years, which often occur, due to the island's high dryness and heat, the aerial parts of perennial herbs and even shrubs and trees, because of reduction in regenerative buds, appear dry, and since these perennial herbs and semi-woody bushes constitute the main vegetation of the island, the island in most years has a gray cover or appearance.