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Dormancy is an important developmental program allowing plants to withstand extended periods of extreme environmental conditions, such as low temperature or drought. Seed dormancy, bud dormancy and desiccation tolerance have been extensively studied, but little is known about the mechanisms involved in the dormancy of drought‐tolerant plants, key to the survival of many plant species in arid and semi‐arid environments. Subtractive PCR cloning of cDNAs from Retama raetam, a C₃ drought‐tolerant legume, revealed that dormancy in this plant is accompanied by the accumulation of transcripts encoding a pathogenesis‐related, PR‐10‐like protein; a low temperature‐inducible dehydrin; and a WRKY transcription factor. In contrast, non‐dormant plants subjected to stress conditions contained transcripts encoding a cytosolic small heat‐shock protein, HSP18; an ethylene‐response transcriptional co …