Chaparral is a kind of land, especially on the dry, sunny hills of California and the American southwest: small oak trees and other low, tough, evergreen bushes growing so close together that you can hardly walk through. After rain it can look green; in late summer it is dry and can burn. The dictionary picture is “land of small oaks packed tight,” and that is a fair start — the Spanish name itself points at the oak. Though actually, people who live with it use the word for the whole shrubland, not only the oaks: a mix of low woody plants that like heat and hate wet feet. You will not hear it for countryside in Taiwan; it is a New World landscape word, borrowed from Spanish. In science writing it names that whole plant community. In ordinary American talk it is simply “those thick dry hills.”