Guggal is a spiny shrub or small tree of the family Burseraceae, the family that also gives the world frankincense and myrrh. It is native to India, Arabia and Pakistan, and in India grows in the arid, rocky tracts of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka. Its ash-coloured bark peels away in large rough flakes to expose an under-bark that peels in turn, and the tree stands leafless for most of the year. It tolerates poor, sandy to silt-loam soils low in organic matter, and is both drought and salinity resistant - the qualities that make it a natural fit for the dry commons of Kutch. What makes it difficult to restore is the other end of its life cycle: guggal seeds do not germinate easily and saplings take roughly ten years to mature, so a plantation of this kind is a decade-long commitment rather than a season's work.

The oleo-gum resin tapped from guggal has been used in Ayurveda, Unani and Siddha medicine for centuries, and modern interest in it rests on guggul extract's action on the Farnesoid X Receptor, which regulates cholesterol and the bile acids the liver produces from it. Commercial demand on that scale, combined with destructive tapping, habitat degradation and extremely poor natural regeneration, drove the population down: the 2015 IUCN assessment placed Commiphora wightii in the Critically Endangered category on an estimated global decline of more than 80 per cent over three generations, taken as 84 years. Mitha Guggal, Commiphora stocksiana, is the rarer of the two locally, with a distribution restricted to Kutch. Planting them back onto gaucharland matters because it is in-situ conservation - the species is returned to its own landscape rather than kept in a nursery - and because gaucharlands themselves carry forage, ground cover, wildlife, pollinators, soil health, groundwater recharge and local livelihoods on the same patch of ground.