What the Sea Gives Back: Foraging the Sussex Coast in June

There is a particular quality of light on the Sussex coast in June that does not exist anywhere else. Low and gold in the early morning, it catches the seed heads of the marram grass (Ammophila arenaria) along the dune ridges and turns them briefly luminous — a whole hillside of small torches, lit and extinguished in the space of an hour. By mid-morning the sky has gone white with heat and the sea is flat and pewter-grey, and you can walk for a long time in something very close to silence.

This is the coastline I work with. Not the pier and the ice cream van coastline, though there is nothing wrong with that. The coastline of the margins — the scrubby ground between the beach and the farmland, the chalk cliffs where the wind has flattened everything into submission, the shingle banks where only the most determined plants have managed to get a foothold.

June is when this landscape becomes quietly extraordinary.

What is growing now

Sea rocket (Cakile maritima) is one of the first plants I look for on the shingle. It grows directly on the beach, closer to the tideline than almost anything else, with small lilac flowers and fleshy, salt-tolerant leaves that have a peppery, marine quality when eaten fresh. It is not a medicinal plant in the formal sense, but it is the beach's own food — mineral-rich, vital, tasting precisely of where it grows. Finding it is always a small reminder that life establishes itself in the most inhospitable places, given enough time and stubbornness.

Further back from the tide, where the shingle gives way to rougher ground, sea kale (Crambe maritima) spreads in great glaucous mounds, its white flower clusters already going over by late June, the stems thick and architectural. This is a plant with a long history of use as food along the English coast — the young shoots blanched and eaten like asparagus in spring. By June it is past that stage, but its presence is significant. It speaks to a tradition of coastal people knowing intimately what grew around them and eating it as a matter of course, not as a lifestyle choice.

On the chalk cliffs, where the grassland is thin and wind-scoured, wild thyme (Thymus polytrichus) creeps across the ground in low mats, releasing its scent when stepped on or when the sun hits the leaves at a certain angle. I have sat on a chalk cliff on a June afternoon with the smell of wild thyme rising around me and felt, very simply, that this was sufficient. Thyme is antiseptic, warming, excellent for the respiratory system — a plant of real medicinal value — but in that moment it was simply a smell that made the nervous system exhale.

The medicine of the margin

Coastal foraging is often discussed in terms of what you can take — which plants are edible, which are useful, which can be made into something. And that knowledge matters. But I think the more important thing the coast offers, at least in June, is a different quality of attention.

The shingle demands it. You cannot walk across a shingle bank without looking at your feet, which means you are also, incidentally, looking at what is growing there. The coast forces a slowing-down that the inland landscape does not always require. You cannot stride along a chalk cliff path in the same way you might stride along a pavement. The wind, the unevenness, the sudden views that stop you — all of it interrupts the ordinary pace of thought.

This is, in herbal terms, what we might call nervine medicine. Not from a bottle, not from a tincture, but from the place itself. The nervous system that has been running too fast, processing too much, held too tightly in the architecture of indoor life — that nervous system meets the coastal wind and the flat pewter sea and the smell of wild thyme, and something releases.

Sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) will not be ripe until October — those extraordinary orange berries, among the most nutritionally dense foods growing wild in Britain, are still months away. But the shrubs themselves are visible now along the dune systems, silver-leaved and thorny, marking the edge of things. I always notice them in June as a kind of promise. They are still becoming what they will be.

So, in a sense, is summer.