Indian Sandalwood's underground dependency and its fatal harvest

September 2, 2026Deccan thorn scrub forests

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There is a tree in the dry country around Pune that cannot make a living on its own. (Santalum album) was logged here twice last month, on 14 and 23 August, and the interesting thing about it starts underground.¹ Sandalwood is hemi-parasitic: it makes its own sugars in its leaves like any other tree, but draws water and minerals out of the roots of neighbouring plants, tapping into them below the soil. Seedlings in particular need other plants around them to plug into, which is part of why sandalwood has always been difficult to raise in a plantation row and easy to lose when the scrub around it is cleared.

The fragrance it is famous for is a heartwood story, not a leaf or flower one. The oil accumulates in the dense inner wood, and that heartwood builds slowly over decades. It also runs down into the roots, which is why the traditional harvest lifts the whole tree out of the ground and distills the root wood along with the trunk. There is no cutting it back and letting it come again.

Those two facts together explain the species' predicament: a tree that takes most of a human generation to become worth anything, is worth a great deal the moment it does, and does not survive being harvested. Heavy cutting across its native range in southern India is why wild populations are now considered vulnerable to extinction, and iNaturalist flags the species as threatened.

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