I first encountered coastal wildflowers when I was 11. I was visiting my grandmother’s friend in Devon and a lady said: “Here, dear,” and dug up a clump of Warren crocuses – a rare plant that, at the time, was only thought to grow in the seaside resort of Dawlish Warren. She gave them to me to grow in my garden at home. But of course they didn’t grow away from the sea.
That was when I realised there was something special about coastal wildflowers. They fascinate me because, as well as being beautiful flowers, they often grow in tough locations. Take the rock sea-spurrey: a delicate little plant that appears to grow out of solid rock, such as a crevice in a cliff base. It can put up with being splashed with sea spray and baked by the summer sun. And yet it seems to thrive in that difficult, harsh environment.
There’s even one plant – the slender centaury – that lives on a landslip, which is a dangerous place to live. The only place you can find it is on the cliffs of Dorset on the Jurassic Coast, which are always falling into the sea. Yet somehow it manages to survive.
Other plants, such as eelgrass, thrive in salt marshes: squelchy, muddy places where you wouldn’t want to walk without risking your life. The tide comes in gradually and creates conditions that most plants couldn’t cope with because the salty water would dehydrate them.
Eelgrass, which makes beaches look like grassy meadows, can actually grow entirely submerged in seawater. That means it can stabilise the sand and create a good, safe habitat for marine life, like seahorses. It also stores a lot more carbon than many terrestrial plants.
Other salt marsh plants like cordgrasses are good at protecting low lying areas of our coastline: by creating a tangle of roots and emergent stems, they trap silt and mud, and that slows the advance of the waves breaking on the shore.
Without these plants, which support large numbers of invertebrates that birds and fish rely on, the waves would sweep the mud and sand away during a high tide or rough weather. The waves would then come pounding on the shore, potentially damaging sea walls and pushing the coast farther inland.
One of the most spectacular coastal wildflowers to see is the thrift, also known as the sea pink, which covers cliffs with pink flowers at the end of May. Another is the yellow horned poppy, a bright yellow poppy that grows on shingle beaches. It’s amazing to see it growing there, where there can’t really be any soil. I’m also a big fan of rock sea-lavender, which lives on cliffs all along the coast, and lasts long after other plants have died back.
Some Mediterranean coastal plants have now got a foothold on the south coast of Britain, such as the sea daffodil, a fragrant white flower. As the climate changes, there is a risk that non-native coastal flowers may become more aggressive and crowd out our native species. However, my greatest fear for the future is people not appreciating our coastal wildflowers and thinking: “we can build a harbour here or put a caravan park there, and the plants can go and live somewhere else.”
Those plants are often in a particular place for a good reason. That’s the habitat that really suits them. Once these flowers are lost, they will be lost for ever.
