Common Names: Tamarisk
Habitat: INVASIVE. streams, waterways, bottomlands, banks and drainage washes of natural or artificial waterbodies, moist rangelands and pastures, and other areas where seedlings can be exposed to extended periods of saturated soil for establishment.
Flowers: The pink to white flowers appear in dense masses on 5-10 cm long spikes at branch tips from March to September
Description: deciduous or evergreen shrubs or small trees growing to 1-15 m in height and forming dense thickets, characterized by slender branches and grey-green foliage. The bark of young branches is smooth and reddish-brown. As the plants age, the bark becomes brownish-purple, ridged and furrowed. The leaves are scale-like, 1-2 mm long, and overlap each other along the stem. They are often encrusted with salt secretions.
Comments: It disrupts the structure and stability of North American native plant communities and degrades native wildlife habitat by outcompeting and replacing native plant species, monopolising limited sources of moisture, and increasing the frequency, intensity and effect of fires and floods. Although it provides some shelter, the foliage and flowers provide little food value for native wildlife species that depend on nutrient-rich native plant resources.

Tamarix species are fire-adapted, and have long tap roots that allow them to intercept deep water tables and exploit natural water resources. They are able to limit competition from other plants by taking up salt from deep ground water, accumulating it in their foliage, and from there depositing it in the surface soil where it builds up concentrations lethal to many other plants.
It also has caused problem for southwestern municipalities due to its voracious appetite for water. In any given year, Tamarix consumes 163 billion gallons of water from the Colorado River Basin, an amount equivalent to the water alloted to the state of Nevada.
Source: Wikipedia