People ask me all the time why moringa bounces back so quickly after a hard cutback. You prune it down to almost nothing, and two weeks later it's putting out new growth like nothing happened. There's a reason for that, and it's worth knowing if you're growing moringa in the South.

Scratch the bark on a young moringa stem with your thumbnail. Right under that outer layer, you'll see green. That's chlorophyll. The stems are photosynthesizing even when there's not a leaf on the tree.

When moringa drops its leaves in a drought or a cold snap, it doesn't shut down. It switches strategies. Instead of pulling in CO2 through open leaf pores and losing water in the process, the stems recycle the CO2 the tree produces internally through respiration. It's a closed loop. The tree keeps making energy with almost no water loss.

It's not enough energy to push fast growth. But it's enough to keep the root system alive and the vascular tissue ready to go. So when rain comes, or temperatures come back up, the tree doesn't have to wake up from a deep sleep. It's already running. All it needs is the signal to start pushing leaves again.

That's why you can pollard a moringa hard in late spring, come back two weeks later, and find new shoots everywhere. The tree never really stopped working.

We've been growing moringa here since 2015. This is one of those things you notice before you understand it. Once you see that green layer under the bark, you understand why people in arid climates have depended on this tree for a long time.