Sea Buckthorn

Bill Meek uncovers the wild beauty of a shrub commonly found around the dunes on the county’s coastline.

Sea Buckthorn’s unique combination of black twigs, silver-green foliage and beautiful orange-red berries provides the essential colour palette for many of the wilder and more romantic parts of Lincolnshire’s open coast.

This charismatic and well-defended shrub in no small part gives our Lincolnshire coast its special feel; while Sea Buckthorn occurs as a native plant in every east coast county from Northumberland down to Kent, Lincolnshire has far and away the largest indigenous population.

Indeed, so common is it here that despite its rarity at a national level, we sometimes consider it an “invasive” on our sand dunes, and large quantities may be removed to prevent it from smothering a less competitive dune flora, and creating easier access to the beach.

Pollen analysis shows that during the Ice Age, Sea Buckthorn became temporarily abundant over the land area of Britain at times when retreating ice gradually gave way to more tundra-like vegetation.

In today’s warmer climate, an inability to compete with our modern temperate flora has caused Sea Buckthorn to retreat to the empty wilds of our sandy shorelines. However, the ghost of its ancient inland dominance is still apparent in abundant municipal roadside plantings, where it inspires none of the special atmosphere it does in its seaside home, its popularity with town planners a result of salt-tolerance.

Wild food
The shelter of coastal Sea Buckthorn provides the first rest, and the red berries the first food, for tired migrant thrushes – blackbirds, fieldfares and redwings – fresh in from the North Sea in October and November.

Humans, too, can eat the berries; indeed they have extraordinary health-giving properties, being extremely rich in valuable antioxidants and other minerals. However, they are lemon-sour and horribly difficult to gather from between the plants’ black, protective thorns.

I have seen bottled Sea Buckthorn juice on sale on the Baltic and on the Russian side of the Gulf of Finland, where it is no doubt commoner than it is here. Although “bletted” and sweetened before consumption, and despite the multifarious health benefits, this fruit is still a taste we in the UK would no doubt need to get used to.

Sea Buckthorn’s scientific name ‘Hippophae’ is derived from the Latin ‘hippo’ (for horse) and ‘phaeos’ (which means shine). In Greece, its leaves and twigs were used as fodder for horses which, it is said, would gain weight and develop a shining coat. It has been used as a medicinal plant by humans since at least 900 AD.

The dense clusters of orange berries long outlast the leaves on the plant, and in some years provides an extraordinary source of colour to our Lincolnshire winter dunescapes.

By the spring when the leaves reappear, what berries remain are mostly bleached to pink or white.

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