We have a handful of outdoor plants arranged on the balcony.

Just for the sake of a bit of greenery in a part of the world that has very little of it, naturally. The “dirt” of Abu Dhabi island is not actually dirt. It is sand, with little or no nutrients in it. And not much of anything can grow in that.

We water our few plants fairly regularly. Occasionally I try to mix in a little bit of potting soil. And we talk about buying liquid nitrogen, to give the plants a boost — but haven’t actually done it yet.

A few of our plants are identifiable. “Rubber trees” or something like them, with broad flat leaves. (These are the stars of our balcony garden.) A weak and scraggly bougainvillea.

But the strangest one is something we call, simply, The Stick Tree.

How this thing can be alive is amazing.

It is planted in “soil” that appears to be almost entirely sand. How someone could have put that plant in such bad dirt is … odd. But it was waiting for us when we moved into our last apartment, four years ago, and it was clinging grimly to life, and we brought it with us, in all its glory, to the new place.

The plant is made up of a single central growth about four feet high, and even at its base the “trunk” is no more than a half-inch across.

After about a foot of no growth, it then throw out even more delicate “branches”, and near the ends of those branches sprout a handful of small leaves.

The leaves are so few, I can count them. It has 30, at this moment.

The Stick Tree never appears to bloom. It must, because how else would the species regenerate itself? But we never see it. Just the leaves.

From time to time, the leaves nearly all fall off. And then the Stick Tree looks even more pathetic and seems almost certainly dead.

But, usually, a little jolt of water, or a change in the temperature seems to rejuvenate the Stick Tree, and there it is again, pathetic and small but sprouting a half dozen leaves, clearly alive.

What sort of plant is it? I suppose it is a bush, because trees don’t stay so small and frail for years, can they?

But if it is a bush it has no bush-iness to it. At all. Just a few twig-like branches with three or four leaves.

If anyone can identify it, feel free to let me know what it is.

I suppose all I can really divine from watching the Stick Tree is how every living thing on this planet clings to life as long as it can. Sometimes, with surprising success.