The history of desert development has focused on prospecting and extraction of resources (oil and water; Jones, Desert Kingdom), irrigation to bring new lands into cultivation to meet the demands of growing populations (“making the desert bloom” or the expansion of arable land; Mitchell, Rule of Experts; Waterbury, Hydropolitics of the Nile Valley), or technological advances such as solar power (Hare and Kressel, The Desert Experience in Israel). These approaches accord a central role to scientific expertise as it developed or was imported into the Middle East. Date palm cultivation offers, however, a more global and complex story of “development.” A keystone and iconic plant of the Middle East grown with a distinctive reproductive regime, the Phoenix dactylifera L. and techniques of its cultivation were actively exported at the turn of the twentieth century (1880-1930s) to develop a commercial industry of date cultivation in the United States (Arizona and California) and Mexico with an exchange of scientific information designed to transform this agricultural resource into “green wealth.” In a 1934 edition of the Scientific Monthly, Walter Swingle promoted these “new crops for the American Sahara.” The date palm work helped to establish the contours of the broader project of using the Middle Eastern desert as a laboratory for agriculture under heat stress or drought and later, global climate change and desertification (Diallo 2003). Date palms have provided “food, shade, and shelter” to desert inhabitants, transforming arid environments into lush microclimates for agriculture (Diallo 2003; Nasrallah 2011). This paper examines the history of research on date palm biology and cultivation as well as efforts that structured its elevation into a focal plant for botanical research. Drawing on a long series of scientific studies of the date palm, histories of the institutional locations of date palm research and biotechnology in the Middle East (e.g., the Date Palm Research Center at the College of Agriculture and Food Science at King Faisal University in Saudi Arabia), state documents, policies, ethnographic accounts, and the press, this paper argues that a new development discourse about desert expertise emerged from date palm research and its export from the region. Like other locally developed practices that allow for life beyond “the aridity line” or the desert threshold (Weizman and Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline), date palm trees expanded desert development into international and regional markets and conflicts and ultimately led to new demarcations of climatic zones.