Plants utilize different mechanisms to cope with drought stress; namely, drought escape, drought tolerance, drought recovery, and drought avoidance. Roots are plants' primary means of nutrient and water uptake, and also play a vital role in soil preservation while anchoring plants in place. Recently, extreme climate events such as heat waves and droughts are occurring more frequently due to global warming. Water limited conditions (also referred to as droughts) are characterized by soil moisture availability insufficient to support average plant growth and production. Under such conditions, plants must alter their root morphology in order to absorb more water and nutrients. When studying the morphological structure and distribution of root systems, it is helpful to understand the stress-resistance mechanism. Thus, the present study investigated the spatial distribution and secondary structure of the roots of Ziziphus jujuba var. spinosa, which is distributed across Yantai, Shijiazhuang, Yinchuan, and Turpan, which create a natural drought gradient because of their differences in soil moisture, annual precipitation, and humidity coefficients. The results showed that the quantity of vessels in the secondary structures of roots increased and vessel diameter also increased as drought conditions worsened along the gradient from Yantai to Turpan. In addition, Ziziphus jujuba Mill. Possessed the longest of rootlets (d≤2 mm). With increased drought stress, the proportion of fine roots distributed in the deeper soil layers gradually increased. In the horizontal direction, the root could grow to 560 cm, and a large number of rootlets grew from the end of the taproot. As drought stress increased, roots 5 mm < d < 10 mm in length made up a large proportion of the total root length. This illustrates that most of water and nutrition was acquired from this section when plants were exposed to a drought ecotope. The difference in root system distribution Ziziphus jujube Mill. in different ecotypes is an adaptive trait.