Huge blue-green, crinkled, cabbage-like clumps on loose shingle, topped in early summer with honey-scented sprays of white four-petalled flowers
Sea kale, Crambe maritima.
Nature · Wildflowers & flowers
Sea kale
Native · flowers early summer · shingle beaches and sand
Crambe maritima — Brassicaceae
Sea kale is a robust, blue-green, cabbage-like perennial of shingle beaches, forming great clumps of wavy, fleshy leaves crowned in early summer by billowing sprays of honey-scented white flowers. It is a wild cousin of cabbage and turnip, and its young shoots were once a prized vegetable, blanched like rhubarb by Georgian and Victorian gardeners. Picking and coastal development have thinned its wild colonies.
How to spot them
- ▸Large, thick, blue-green, wavy-edged, crinkled leaves that look like an oversized cabbage
- ▸Domed sprays of small, four-petalled white flowers, fragrant, on stout stems to about 75 cm
- ▸Round, corky, one-seeded green pods like little peas after flowering
- ▸Grows on loose shingle and sand at the top of the beach, often as isolated clumps
- ▸Look-alike: wild cabbage, Brassica oleracea, of sea cliffs — it has yellow flowers and long thin pods; sea kale flowers are white and the pods are round
How to know it
Georgian and Victorian gardeners blanched the young shoots of this shingle plant under pots to eat like asparagus or rhubarb
Sea kale — cultivated as a vegetable, and the young shoots are edible cooked.
A brassica of the shingle, it is a wild relative of cabbage and turnip, but its flowers are white and its round pods hold a single seed
Sea kale, in the cabbage family, Brassicaceae.
Its cliff-dwelling relative, the wild cabbage, has yellow flowers and long pods, whereas this beach plant has white flowers and round pods
The cliff plant is wild cabbage; this is sea kale.
Fleshy, waxy, blue-green leaves help this shingle plant cope with salt spray, wind and sun-baked stones
Sea kale — an adaptation to salt and drought.
Now scarce in many places, its wild colonies have been reduced by picking and disturbance; Dungeness is a classic site for its great clumps
Sea kale.
Quick-fire facts
- •Native perennial of shingle and sand; the RHS gives its native range as Europe to the Caucasus
- •Grows to about 75 cm; flowers in early summer in dense, fragrant white sprays up to 60 cm across (RHS)
- •Family Brassicaceae — the cabbage family; the genus Crambe is Greek for cabbage
- •The young shoots, leaves and flowering shoots are edible when cooked (RHS)
- •Cultivated as a vegetable from the 18th century and often forced or blanched, like rhubarb, for its pale shoots
- •Wild plants are sensitive to disturbance; unauthorised uprooting of any wild plant is an offence under section 13 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981
- •Garden 'sea kale' is grown as an ornamental for coastal and gravel gardens; greater sea kale, Crambe cordifolia, is a garden plant, not a British native
Drill it — 7 cards
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Sources
- Royal Horticultural Society — Crambe maritima (sea kale)
- Royal Horticultural Society — Stone and coast habitats