Shrubby sea-blite
Suaeda vera
Family · Amaranthaceae · Irritating
The fleshy bluish shrub of salt marshes and salt-washed rocks, with sausage-shaped leaves that store fresh water where everything else is salt.
Dunes and sand · Walls and rocks
Also known assea blite, shrubby seablite
How to tell it
A shrub half a metre to a metre and a half, much branched with a woody base. Alternate, cylindrical, fleshy leaves one to two centimetres, blue-green and covered in a waxy film that makes them look dusted. Minute green petalless flowers at the axils. It grows in salt marsh, salt-washed cliff and back-dune.
What it is confused with
Sea orache
Atriplex halimus
Both are bluish salt-marsh shrubs. Sea orache has broad flat diamond leaves covered in silvery scales; sea-blite has cylindrical sausage leaves. Both were eaten.
Open sheet →What it is for
The fleshy leaves were eaten raw and cooked around the Mediterranean, salty and crisp, and the burnt plant gave the soda of old glassworks. It accumulates salt and whatever else is in the soil, so it is not gathered in marshes near farming or roads.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.