scraggly

The Vietnamese people smuggler emerged, briefly and hesitantly, from the shadows of a scraggly forest close to the northern French coastline.

Still, the mention of native, low-water landscaping, or xeriscaping, conjures images of dusty plots with a few cactuses and scraggly shrubs interspersed with rocks.

With a scraggly stem a few meters tall, a handful of slim branches and modest, hand-shaped leaves, it doesn't look like anything special.

“Because by the look of you, even if you were gold, you wouldn’t weigh enough, you scraggly thing.”

Nearby, a goat tried its luck with a nibble on a thorny, scraggly bush.