The Vegetable Mudfish: Samphire
I MADE THE ACQUAINTANCE OF SAMPHIRE on the North Norfolk coast in the 1960s. It’s a local delicacy, pickled, or cooked like asparagus, or just munched raw in the creeks. It looks unprepossessing, a bunch of floppy green strings, a spine-free marine cactus with its succulent segments sporting barely visible scales in place of conventional leaves. But my first encounter with it challenged the preconceptions I had about plants, the forms they might exist in, the bizarreness of their lives, their possible feral dangers. That primal sprig was the vegetable equivalent of a mudfish, a marine organism making the supreme adventure of colonising the land. It had flowers, minute dots of yellow on the fleshy stems, but they spent half their lives blooming under the sea. When I first tasted it the iodine-and-ozone tang was unlike anything I had experienced in my mouth before. Even in this basic role as an eccentric comestible, it seemed transgressive, a chimera from a medieval bestiary, half vegetable, half miniature sea monster. On the occasions it was sold commercially it was in fishmongers’ shops or on quayside stalls, not by greengrocers. Huge and eccentric specimens were sometimes mounted above pub bars, as if they were prize pike. I once saw a colony that had invaded an abandoned dinghy, taking over the silted deck one low tide then rising up at high water to become a waterborne buffet counter.
Our gang picked our own in the muddy creeks, where the sheaves of branched green shoots could grow up to a foot tall. These foraging trips were like baptisms of mud, submersions in an element where life had different mores. Shoreline mud isn’t like the mud in a cart track. It’s gelatinous, shiny, grasping. It’s a terrain for fleeting, cautious visitors – the wickering redshank that flew about us, the scuttling crabs, even ourselves, because though we sometimes thought we would be sucked irretrievably into its warm gloopiness, we always managed to scramble clear. But not, surely, for plants, the epitomes of fixedness. Later I saw samphire on the intertidal mudflats, in another kind of growth form, its young green spikes tightly covering acres of the glutinous surface. It’s an annual plant, the first urgent coloniser of bare mud, and it made these bare shoals at the edge of sea look like bowling greens. We were instructed in harvesting lore by a local called Crow, a jack of all coastal trades. His stern picking rules seemed to link social tradition and ecological imperative. You should never wash or store ‘sea asparagus’ (pronounced ‘sparrowgrass’ locally) in freshwater, which would suck out its sap, leaving only a wilted shell. What you have picked should have been ‘washed by every tide’. The latter seemed a sensible laundering principle, given the execrable muddiness of its habitat, but also evidence of astonishing endurance for a flowering plant. Samphire’s adaptation to saltwater dousing is the same as a desert plant’s to drought. Both habitats lack fresh water, so plants store their own in ‘aqueous tissue’. They become succulents. What helps the plant survive is what causes it to melt like concentrated green jelly between the teeth.
But there seemed something counter-intuitive about its life cycle. Its ability to survive submersion by the tides, twice daily for six months of the year, means that samphire creates the conditions for its own annihilation. The stems on the mudflats closest to the sea are densely packed, and catch debris washed in by the tides – grains of sand, flecks of mud, crushed shells, dead shrimps, seabirds’ feathers – and hold them together as silt, which is cemented further by insinuating growths of algae and bacteria. Samphire builds land. I’d watch the flats for hours, seeing a whole embryonic ecosystem rise and sink. Sometimes a tidal surge would breach the sea-wall defences, and change the whole order of things. Liquid mud would flow into hollows in the shingle, or deep into the freshwater grazing marshes. Samphire would smartly follow, doing exactly what it has evolved to do. A diligent botanist in the 1930s, probing the mudflats at Scolt Head just a few miles west of where we foraged ourselves, had found that, in the communities of samphire at the lowest edge of the saltmarsh, the land was rising at the rate of a quarter of an inch a year. In fifty years (assuming no savage tidal surges) it would have risen by just over a foot and dried out enough for perennial plants like sea aster and sea lavender to become established, and samphire able to find ever fewer open patches for its seeds. In 200 years the surface of the marsh would theoretically have risen by more than a yard, and might not be washed by any tide, let alone two a day. Samphire, simply living the way it does, makes its terroir untenable for itself. It seemed to me, then, to fly against every principle of evolution as I understood it. Why hadn’t a super samphire developed by natural selection, a strain which grew more widely spaced, or whose root system self-destructed just before seeding, so that the mud was left in the deliciously oozy fluidity that the plant was best adapted to?
I eventually learned that this wasn’t how evolution worked outside the laboratory. Plants might be overridingly concerned with the survival of their own genes, but except in the case of a very few forest trees, none of them manipulate their habitats to ensure their own continuance over other species. That is our own species’ dubious prerogative. Nature abhors vacuous monocultures, with all their intrinsic vulnerabilities, and in the real world evolution is a social business, where diversity and succession and give and take are the rules. Plants don’t have ‘purposes’, but they do have roles, and fulfil these in specialised situations and often for strictly limited time spans. A samphire lawn may become a grass pasture dry enough to graze cattle, but one good storm surge and the vegetal mudfish will be back, taking advantage of solid land that has become mobile again, and slowly reclaiming it.
Some years on I saw a patch of flood-threatened East Anglian coastland where this had been allowed to happen deliberately. The sea walls, ineffective barriers to storm surges, had been bulldozed down round a patch of farmland, to see if a naturally formed saltmarsh would be a more effective buffer. The first storm washed the cultivated soil away, but within a year samphire was invading the bare patches, building a different and more absorbent land, capable of soaking up both the sea water itself and its furious energy. Inviting, so to speak, vegetation to suggest its own solution to environmental challenges is different from treating it as a submissive service provider, and, I’d suggest, a better basis for a long-term relationship.
I wrote my first full-length book, Food for Free, a kind of post-modern guide to foraging, prompted by this quirky sea vegetable. Samphire taught me that the divisions between plant as sustenance for the body and nourishment for the imagination, and between scientific fascination and Romantic inspiration, were fluid. Everything I have written since has been influenced by the thought of its ephemeral life, in which opportunism, self-expression and utility are able to coexist.