The problem of finding a broadcast tree with minimum power consumption has received much attention due to two reasons. They are (a) the limited bandwidth of wireless networks and (b) the nodes are battery operated. This work proposes heuristic memetic algorithm to find minimum energy broadcast tree in wireless ad hoc networks. The simulation results on numerous problem instances confirm that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms several heuristic algorithms in terms of solution quality. The experimental evaluation of the memetic algorithm shows that it generally improves over other recently proposed algorithms. By solving well-known benchmark problem instances with 20 and 50 nodes, it also demonstrates the effectiveness of memetic algorithm in terms of computation time. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.