The Desert Willow of the Research Administration Building

Everything else on this campus was brought here. The desert willow was already living in this landscape when the city arrived. Chilopsis linearis grows wild in the washes out at Red Rock Canyon, half an hour west, where flash floods do the pruning; the state champion is this one at UNLV, pruned instead by grounds staff into something taller and tidier than any wild plant gets. The Nevada Big Tree Register measured it in 2015 at 60 inches around, 42 feet tall and 34 feet across, by the Research Administration Building. The university named the same 42 feet in November 2025. It is not a willow. The long narrow leaves are the reason for the name, but it sits with catalpas and jacarandas, and it flowers like them: pink trumpets in loose clusters from late spring through the worst of the summer heat, worked over by hummingbirds. That is the reason to time a visit. Two honest notes. Its age is not recorded anywhere we could find and cannot be derived. And this pin is the roughest on the page: we could not place the Research Administration Building on a current campus map, so the coordinates fall on the campus generally rather than on a building. Ask at a campus desk, or send us the spot and we will fix it.