sea reed, and a common poa grass, with a root-like bulb, are familiar
objects on swampy seashores; and a whole group of grass plants
belonging to a tribe called Sclerochloa inhabit sandy seasides. The
couch-grass dwells there also; and the list may be closed by noticing
the sea-barley, a tiny plant, but loving sandy pastures near the sea.
And among the ferns a spleenwort lives on rocks over the sea.
These are all plants of a complicated structure, and produce seed.
But those about to be noticed are the true sea-weeds, which have a
simple construction and belong to the cellular plants.
Where the land-plant ends, the sea-weed begins, and as some flowering
plants or grasses come close to the edge of the high spring tide, so
some sea-weeds choose that position, and appear to like a dry time
for a while, and a refreshing return of the salt water at distant
intervals.
One of these sea-weeds abounds on muddy seashores, at the entrance of
rivers and marshes, and positively adheres to the roots of flowering
plants. North Wales, Shoreham, the Essex coast, and the Shannon
are places where it is found in abundance. Moreover, like most of
the sea-weeds, it has a wide distribution, for it is found on the
Atlantic shores of Europe as far south as Spain. The plant is from
2 to 4 inches high, and consists of stems about as thick as stout
bristles. They branch and give off side-twigs, like the veins of
leaves in shape, and each ends in a curious curl. The whole plant
is limp, and easily squeezed flat. It is of a dull purple color,
and from its curl endings has received a Greek name, “bostrukos,” a
ringlet. Old authors called it “Amphibia,” from its locality, which
has just been noticed; and it is remarkable, because most of the
other red or reddish sea-weeds of its group live in deep water.
Another sea-weed which lives at the very top of high-water mark, but
which is also found on the shores down to low-water mark, and still
lower, is a fine plant often growing a foot in height. Its stem is
round and solid, and branched in what is called a pinnate manner,
like a mimosa leaf. It is yellow or livid green in color, and is very
small and starved at high-water mark, but it grows larger and larger
until well under the sea. One of the kind is found on loose stones,
where a rill of pure fresh water runs into the sea. In Scotland it
was formerly eaten under the name of pepper dulse; but better things
are now to be had. It is named Laurencia after a French botanist.
A membrane-like sea-weed, which grows upward with swellings like a
cactus which give it the appearance of a chain, is called the little
chain sea opuntia (Catenella Opuntia). It is also a dweller on rocks,
close up to high-tide mark, on our shores as far as the Orkneys.
Often at high-water mark, and on wood and stones down to half-tide
level, there is a quantity of dark olive-green sea-weed, in small
tufts, getting larger nearer the sea, which often looks dried
up, shriveled, and crisp. It grows in tufts when the water goes
off rapidly, and it evidently requires exposure to the air for
several hours in the day. Nearer the ever-rolling sea the plant
grows larger. It is called the channeled fucus, and has an expanded
part or root, and a stem which branches in twos, and ends in two
long cones of softish stuff which contain the reproductive organs
or spores, called receptacles. It belongs to the same group of
sea-weeds as the commonest of all, or that which has air-bladders on
it and which crackle and burst under the feet. A differently colored
high-water-mark weed is found at Yarmouth, Bantry Bay, Torquay, and
Sunderland on sand-covered rocks. It lies prostrate and is of a pale
green color, forming masses or layers of excessively minute threads
of vegetable tissue. It belongs to the genus Codium.
The sea-weeds called wracks or fucus are among the most common of
the dark greenish-olive kinds, and one of them lives in a curious
place on the shore. The stem or frond is from one to two feet long;
there is a kind of midrib to it, besides the cones or receptacles,
at the tip of each branch. It is common from Orkney to Cornwall in
many places, and is found where a good deal of fresh water mixes
with the sea, but it is not restricted to such peculiar positions,
for some of the most vigorous plants live in salt water, and some
very transparent and weak ones in brackish water. The common bladder
fucus is found everywhere on rocks and stones and wood left exposed
at low water, and on artificial quays in estuaries extending up
rivers as far as the water is decidedly brackish. Even in salt water
it is noticed to flourish. The plant or frond is in long, flat, thin
branches with a midrib, on either side of which are the bladders,
which contain air. The branches end in thick gummy-feeling masses,
which are turgid, rather pointed, and contain the spores. The color
is olive and it is lighter in the younger parts. It is found along
the shores of the Northern Atlantic, extending even to the tropics.
It is used as manure, and also in forming kelp for the purposes
of the manufacture of iodine. Cattle eat it in the winter, and of
late it has been used in baths. A larger kind of fucus grows from
high-tide mark to mid-tide level, and it has large swellings on its
stem, and the branches, which come off in whorls, are distended,
as it were. It is used in the kelp manufacture and for covering up
oysters. The Scotch shore-men call it the sea-whistle, for boys make
whistles out of the larger air-vessels.
The serrate fucus, so called from its saw-like edges, has no
bladders, it clothes the rocks at half-tide level, is very common,
and is found on the western shores.
On the rocky bottoms of submarine tide-pools, near low-water mark,
all round the coasts of Scotland and England, is a weed with narrow
fronds and pinnate ones of a lance-head shape, with spiny teeth on
their edges. It is a clear olive-brown plant, and gets a verdigris
tint when it is exposed. It is called the ligulate desmarestia.
Perhaps more beautiful, but not more interesting than these kinds
of fucus, are the ulvæ, those broad, flat, wrinkled edged, green
sea-weeds, looking like half-transparent membranes. One of them, the
broad ulva, has a small disk by way of a root, and grows from six
to twenty inches in length and from three to twelve in breadth, in
tufts of different shapes. It is very common on all shores, on rocks
and stones between tide-marks, and extends downward to a depth of
ten fathoms. It has a wonderful geographical distribution, for, with
the exception of the coldest regions of the globe, it inhabits every
shore. It used to be eaten under the title of oyster green, being
prepared like laver; and the Icelanders used to, and perhaps may
still, ascribe an anodyne virtue to it. They bind it on the forehead
in fevers, writes a Scottish botanist.
The other ulva, which is nearly as common as this, is smaller, and
grows in the form of an inflated bag, which opens and expands. It
is of a very bright and yellowish green, and it is thinner and more
delicate than the other kind. It is seldom seen except in spring or
early summer, on rocks, stones, and shells between tide-marks, and it
is generally distributed around British shores and those of Europe.
A very common green weed, found between tide-marks and also in
ditches running into the sea, was supposed by its first describers
to resemble an entrail or intestine; hence it has been called
Enteromorpha intestinalis, from the Greek words _enteron_, entrail,
and _morpha_, form. It grows from a few inches to a foot or more
in length, and from a line to three or four inches in diameter.
Seen where it is attached to a stone, it is like a tube, hollow,
membrane-like, and green; but further out it is larger and swells
out into an irregular bag, crisped and curled here and there. It is
very common all over the world, and finds its way sometimes into
fresh water. The Rev. J. Pollexfen notices that it is prepared for
culinary purposes by the Japanese for an ingredient in their soups.
The other common green Enteromorpha is called “the compressed.” It
is in the form of a branching green, delicate tube, flattened here
and there; and it clothes rocks between tide-marks, being sometimes
as fine as a hair. It gets narrower at its attachment and is broad
at the ends. Near high-water mark it forms a short, shaggy pile of
slender fronds spreading over rocks and stones, and most treacherous
to the stepping of unwary feet, being most slippery. A little lower
down, in the rock-pools, it is larger, tubular, branched, and thin
near the root; and where fresh water runs in close to it, the fronds
get larger, broader, and more inflated. Almost everything on floating
timber or on stone is this kind of weed. From being more or less
tubular, these Enteromorphæ have a double green membrane. Now there
is a beautiful ribbon-shaped ulva which has this double formation
and which is found at half-tide level. It is long, even reaching to
two feet, and is only half an inch to two inches broad. Very elegant
and graceful are its tapering, curling, wrinkling, and plaiting of
the edges; it is called Ulva linza, and is of a bright green color.
Among the commonest of the small green sea-weeds are the confervæ,
hairy-like green threads, which collect in layers and fleeces and
cover much surface, or wave in the rock-pools. One kind called the
sandy conferva lives at half-tide level at Bantry Bay and also in
Scotland at Appin. It forms fleeces a yard or more in extent, made
up of thin layers placed over each other, but so slightly connected
that they may be separated like gauze, for some inches, without
breaking. The hairs or filaments are five or six inches long and
are rather rigid; they are very long-pointed, and consist of a
delicate tube membrane which incloses a series of long cells. Another
conferva, found attached to other sea-weeds at Bantry Bay, Berwick,
Firth of Forth, and Torquay, has its filaments forming densely
interwoven layers which cling over their supporting plant. It is of a
dark green color. A third frequents salt pools by the edge of the sea
and rocks at half-tide level. It is a very twisted thing, and forms
crisped layers from a few inches to several feet thick, which closely
adhere to the inequalities of the rock, or to the plants which grow
on it. It is of a glossy brilliant green color, and is called the
tortuous conferva.
There is a pretty green hair-like plant which branches and gives off
branchlets on one side more than on the other. It comes from a little
group of stems on a stone, and forms a small stunted but very elegant
bush, three or four inches high. This cladophora lives in the purest
and clearest sea-water only, and in rocky pools left by the tide near
low-water mark. It is only got at low spring tides at Dingle and
Dublin, and it evidently likes the cool sea-water and darkness. A
sea-weed called the Adherent Codium forms a velvet-like pile on the
surface of rocks in the southwest of England near low-water mark, but
it is rare. Sometimes the green velvet-looking film may be three feet
across, and it consists of myriads of short cylindrical filaments
with simple club-shaped hairs on them. It is soft and gelatinous,
sticks to paper, and appears to grow slowly. Another codium, called
the amphibious, has been mentioned already. It occupies a different
position on the shore to the other. It frequents turf banks on the
west of Ireland, in County Galway, where the bog touches the shore.
It is a very mesh of entangled filaments, and it dries up to almost
nothing in dry weather, and increases and grows again on the coming
of the welcome tide, spray, or rain. There is also a large codium
with branches, which looks like a sponge.
Barnacles and shells, living at low-water mark, in exposed situations
on the western shores of Scotland and Ireland, Falmouth, and the
Land’s End, have a weed upon them of a purplish-brown color like
a “crop of threads” (Nemaleon) of from three to ten inches long.
They are slender, solid, and divide in twos from a little expanded
base. In some places it chooses particular positions, and in our
Irish localities it grows in shallow pools on the granite rocks, and
nowhere else.
A common weed, sometimes twenty inches in length, varies from pale
yellow in shallow water to dark purple in deeper places; it lives
at half-tide level, and is made up of tubular fronds filled with
watery gelatine. Its tube swells, here and there, and bends at the
end in a curious manner. It is called, after a French naturalist,
Dumontia. Another weed with a cylindrical stem has many branches,
and has swellings at their origin like so many knots. These are
air-vessels and help to support the plant, which is rather leathery.
It is found on the English and Irish shores, and is called the
bladder chain-weed (Cystoseira). But the most elegant of the weeds
with air-bladders is called the sea oak (Halidrys) and it is found
commonly on rocks and stones in the sea, below half-tide level. The
fronds are from one to four feet in length, and the branches bear
numerous long pods with compartments in them, the whole looking like
a mustard-pod, and these are the air-chambers.
The waving, slender, long weed, so slimy to the touch, and which is
so abundant on all British shores--the dread of the bather when it
forms submarine meadows, over mud flats--is called the cord-weed
(Corda filum). It is sometimes forty feet, but usually from one to
twenty feet in length, and is not twice as thick as a bristle where
it starts from a stone, tapering and clothed with delicate hair,
getting wider in the middle, and slender and hairy at the top.
There are some remarkable sea-weeds, which certainly do not look like
things belonging to the sea, but rather to the land, where lichens
and fungi live on stones and trees. One often is called rivularia,
and is found on rocks, at half-tide level, on the southern shores of
England, and in the South and west of Ireland. It incrusts the rocks,
rising in short lobes, and it feels fleshy and firm. It begins with
a globe-shaped substance, which sends forth ragged-looking pieces;
and although it is so dense, the surface is covered with a close pile
of exquisite filaments. Many a dark rock, otherwise perfectly barren
at the end of summer, is clothed with the bright green patches of
this singular weed. Another of these incrusting things is often as
round as a half-crown, and looks like a lichen. It is leathery, and
gets ragged and warty with age, and is of a coffee-brown color. It is
called Ralfsia, after Mr. Ralf. A third kind looks like a flat thin
clot or stain of blood; hence its name cruoria, from “cruor,” blood.
It forms a scum on the smooth, exposed rocks between tide-marks, and
is especially abundant in the west of Ireland and Jersey. The patches
are from one to three inches in diameter, and their edges are very
clearly curved; they are brown and red, and the hairs or filaments of
which they are composed are purplish red. It can be removed in flakes
with a knife.
Many sea-weeds are found upon others; and indeed some of the most
beautiful kinds are thus parasitic upon larger ones. An instance of
this occurs to one of the humble crust-like weeds which is found on
pebbles at half-tide mark. So small is the parasite that a slight
magnifying power is required to make it distinct, and then it is
found to be made up of thousands of minute forked threads, each of
which consists of several long cells, one placed before the other,
and some of the cells are large and egg-shaped, and contain the seeds
or spores. It is called the Myrionema, from two Greek words which
mean numberless thread.
The next great group of sea-weeds to be noticed on the shore has many
more kinds below low-water mark, where they are never uncovered,
than above. They are the great dark, olive-colored, ribbon-shaped,
wavy-edged weeds, which have a tough skin and roots, which adhere
to rocks, and which are called tangles and laminariæ by botanists.
Their proper position, as a rule, is not on the shore, for they
almost characterize a particular zone of depth; but there are kinds
to be met with on rocks and timber, close to the low-water mark,
and on the shore. Some of them are very remarkable when they are
placed, as they are in the north of England, on the sea-beaten parts
of white or gray rocks. They then often form a dense layer--a sort
of black, moving fringe, which is sometimes uncovered. Most of them
flourish in the most boisterous seas, and it would appear that those
which may, with some reason, be called shore-plants, because they
are close to low-water mark, and now and then uncovered, are smaller
and more delicate. Thus one kind, which has been called the weak,
or the papery tangle (Laminaria fascia), has a stem not bigger than
a bristle, which gradually widens into a frond about twelve inches
long and two broad. It is greenish or brownish-olive in color, and is
very fragile. It has the remarkable geographical distribution which
is very common to all those weeds living on the brink of the sea, for
it is found as far off as the Falkland Islands. On British coasts it
covers sandy rocks and stones near low-water mark, and is to be found
in the north of Ireland, the western islands of Scotland, and the
southwest of England.
Another kind fringes precipitous rocks at low-water mark, and is
abundant on the shores of Scotland and of the north and west of
Ireland, the west and southwest coasts of England, and the northeast
coast. Mr. Harvey notices it as one of the kind luxuriating in a
furious sea, although its frond can be readily torn with the hand. It
has a stem as thick as a quill, and a root of many branching fibres.
The frond, or ribbon-shaped leaf, is from three to twenty feet in
length, and only grows three to eight inches broad. It has a midrib
running down its whole length, and the following peculiarities: there
are many little leaflets on either side of the stem before it merges
into the broad frond, and the surface is perforated with small pores,
out of which come tufts of shred-like fibres. It seems to be an
everlasting weed, and the first growth in the frond occurs from the
stem.
The new parts are lighter colored than the old, and after a while
intersection takes place, where the new part joins the old, and
the old leaf falls. This plant, from the side leaves giving it a
winged appearance, is called the Alaria (from _ala_, a wing), and it
is eaten in some parts of Scotland and Ireland. The midrib is the
delicacy, but it is very insipid. The Scottish name is badderlocks,
or henware, and the Irish, murlins.
A most graceful and delicate tangle is to be found on the south and
east coasts of England, all round Scotland, and at Bantry Bay, Howth,
Balbriggan, and Kingston, in Ireland, on rocks and stones in pools
left by the tide. When fresh, it is a clear brown-olive in color,
and it changes to green when dry or when placed in fresh water. The
leaf comes from a stalked root, tapers to the end, is frilled at the
sides, and may be from six inches to three or more feet in length,
and from one to six inches broad. It is thin, but is traversed by a
double layer of large air-cells.
There is a large tangle which goes by the name of furbelows; and when
spread out on the shore may make a circle of fronds twelve feet in
diameter. It is a clear brown-olive in color, and the root gives rise
to a stem with large hollow knobs on it. The leaf is oblong, and is
deeply split into many parts. The plant grows on rocks at low-water
mark, and is abundant.
But the commonest of all these tangles, with its long stem and
branching roots, and beautiful, slippery, crumpled leaf, forms a
belt, about low-water mark, round rocky shores, where its long,
ribbon-like fronds wave gracefully in the water. When it is in deeper
water it is much larger, and is then called the broad-leaved tangle.
The great tangles which are employed to form kelp are not shore
plants, but live covered with water.
The gems of the seashore are, however, not the olive and green
weeds, but the red kinds, and they abound. There is a very large
and handsome one, which is rare in deep, shady pools at extreme
low-water mark, but which is often washed up in storms, about the
southwest coast of England, Bantry Bay, Antrim, Down, and Orkney. It
is somewhat kidney-shaped, in the outlines of the large blood-red
fronds, and has a stout, round stem. It is made up of three layers,
and some plants are male, and others are female. This plant is called
Kalymenia, from the Greek words that mean beautiful and membrane.
Another kind of the Kalymenia, found at Falmouth, Plymouth, and
Bantry Bay, is something like a short, broad tangle with crisped
leaves in shape. It is red, and the root is a disk, and the fronds
are about a foot in length. It is found on rocks and stones, within
tide-marks, in land-locked bays. It is very thin and delicate, and
may be compared with a totally different-feeling red sea-weed, which
has flat fronds of irregular shape, fringed with little leaflets,
the whole being half-gristly to the touch, and of a dull purplish
color. It is common on the shores of the south and west of Ireland
and Jersey. The root is very fibrous, and altogether it is a most
peculiar weed. There is another of these leathery weeds which grows
to some size, and has well-grown leaflets on its edges, besides large
circular markings on its purple surface, which is pretty common
everywhere. They belong to the genus Rhodymenia, so called from the
Greek words red and membrane.
The last kind is the dulse of the Scotch, and the dillisk of the
Irish. Mr. Harvey thus notices its edible peculiarities: “In Ireland
and Scotland this plant is much used by the poor as a relish for
their food. It is commonly dried, in its unwashed state, and eaten
raw, the flavor being brought out by long chewing. On many parts of
the west of England it forms the only addition to potatoes in the
meals of the poorest class. The variety which grows on mussel shells
between tide-marks is preferred, being less tough than other forms,
and the minute mussel-shells and other small shell-fish which adhere
to its folds are nowise unpleasing to the consumers of this simple
luxury, who rather seem to enjoy the additional _goût_ imparted by
the crunched mussels. In the Mediterranean this plant is used in a
cooked form, entering into ragouts and made dishes; and it formed a
chief ingredient in one of the soups recommended under the name of
St. Patrick’s Soup by M. Soyer to the starving Irish peasantry.” It
should be noticed that Dr. Harvey was keeper of the herbarium in the
University of Dublin, and that he wrote in 1846.
Another dark-red sea-weed, which is very iridescent, when waving
under water at low spring tides, is also said to be eaten in
Cornwall, but, Harvey says, more by women than men. It is called the
Edible Iridæa from its rainbow colors, is about six inches in length,
is gristly to the touch, and is rather like a battledore in shape.
The supposed luxury which is served at the tables of many, and which
is called laver in England, and sloke, sloak, or sloukawn in Ireland,
comes from some sea-weeds which are delicately membranaceous, flat,
and more or less purple. The color gives the name Porphyra, from the
Greek word “porphuros,” purple. One kind is something like a large,
crumpled lettuce-leaf in shape, without the veins and stalk, and the
other, which is the commonest, has a long frond like a tangle, of one
or two feet long; but there is no long stalk. The edges are crisped,
and the end of the frond is rather sharp and long. It is very thin,
glossy, and more or less of a vivid purple. It is abundant on rocks
and stones between tide-marks on our British shores, and is an annual.
There is a handsome sea-weed called Nitophyllum punctatum, “a
shining leaf.” It is of a rose-red color, and its membranaceous frond
has its edge cleft; it is veinless, or has irregular veins toward
its base. The thin expansion is very delicate, and is characterized
by the want of “nervures” or veins, and the presence of spots or
tubercles immersed in it. These are large, oblong, and very general,
and contain the spores. In other plants of the same kind the spots
contain tetraspores. The root is from a small disk, and the fronds
grow in small tufts from twelve to twenty inches in length. They are
attached to other weeds at low-water mark; and are found on rocks
down to fifteen fathoms. It is very abundant on the coast of Antrim,
and all round the British coasts.