Waterways Beaches

On the beach, all plants contend with salt water, strong wind, and intense sun. But for gatherers, these extreme conditions are a blessing, for they force plants to protect themselves by retaining water. The stored liquid makes for succulent, crisp herbs that have a great snap and nice salty and bitter flavors. Of course, the beach is also where you'll find live, edible seaweed.

Although pebble beaches support different kinds of plant life than sandy ones, the most important distinctions are determined by proximity to the water. When you look at a beach, imagine that it's split into three zones. Very different plants grow in each zone depending on how much salt they can withstand.

Zone 1: The water

The water is the first zone you can gather in—wearing rubber boots, waders, or a wetsuit. There you'll find edible seaweeds like bladderwrack, gutweed, and spiral wrack. At the water's edge, waves keep everything in constant motion, creating a boundary where nothing grows.

Zone 2: The sand

Comprised of large and small rocks or dry sand, the shoreline is the second zone. Here, the tide washes ashore long strips of seaweed—the greatest source of nutrients on the beach—that fertilize the ground. In this area, you'll find herbs such as European sea rocket, grass-leaved orache, and seaside sandplant—all of which extract nutrients from the seaweed that help them withstand the wind, salt, and sun.

Zone 3: Sand dunes

The third zone is actually an intermediate area between the beach and the landscape beyond. It may be steep or slope more gradually. In many places the beach turns into sand dunes studded with leafy lyme grass. Strong winds are also a determining factor; one set of plants grows on dunes that face the water, while another inhabits the dunes that face inland. On seaside dunes, you'll often find beach pea and broadleaf pepperweed, while bushes and plants that require calmer conditions, such as sea buckthorn and rosehips, tend to cluster on the lee side.

You’ll find the most diversity on the beach from April until September, when edible seaweed, herbs, and berries all flourish. Aquatic herbs first appear in early spring, and grow bigger and more abundant over the course of the summer. In fall there are fewer herbs to gather, but berries and other fruit take their place.

Spring

The season for seaweed collecting starts at the beginning of spring—provided there are rocks in the water for spiral wrack and gutweed, for example, to latch onto. In April, herbs start to pop up in the second zone, amid the washed-up seaweed. Look for small clusters of young, aquatic herbs such as sea plantain, garlic mustard, and broadleaf pepperweed. On pebble beaches you can also pick sea beet. Around sand dunes you'll find the hardy plants like stinging nettles, plantain, and wild parsnip.

Summer

In the water, you can still gather seaweed; in fact, summer is precisely when sea lettuce is in season. Along the beach, grassleaf orache and European sea rocket gather into large, green belts just above the seaweed line. The dry area that begins at roughly the same point and extends up to the dunes is home to beach pea and sand plants. Sea wormwood and rosehips grow in the tall grass around the dunes.

Late summer, fall, and winter

In late summer there are still herbs to gather, but many will have turned bitter and tough after weathering a long season in the sun. You'll have to taste-test in order to find the ones that are still delicious. By October, seaweed’s season will be over, with the exception of bladderwrack, which can be harvested year round. Common scurvygrass grows on the beach in winter, while the dunes are full in fall of sea buckthorn and rosehips.