This site is about the wild flowers of our coasts and about the ecology of these places. I will also include a few articles related to the coastal habitats which I will refer to as background.
I visited the main three habitats, dunes, salt marshes and shingle beaches many times with students when I ran the East Anglian Field Study centre in Norfolk, so the ecology content is largely derived from what I used to teach them.
The wild flowers are photographed from various locations in Britain and one or two were taken further afield as some of our wild flowers do grow beyond our shores. I have included some grasses, sedges and rushes in this exercise, unlike my previous work on Woodland wild flowers. Grasses are after all flowers but not thought of by everyone as flowers not being ‘pretty’ My reason is that several grasses and sedges like Marram Grass and Sand Sedge, Rice Grass and Salt Marsh Grass are so fundamental to the being of these habitats that to not include them would be wrong.
I have included a fourth habitat which combines cliffs, cliff tops, sea walls and rocky places by the sea, these seem to also support a specialised type of flora.
Quick Identification A photographic guide to the plants found in the four habitats., with links to a detailed description of each species. The plants are divided into sections. Salt Marshes, Sand Dunes, Shingle and Sea Cliffs plus other near coastal habitats. Some species obviously occur in more than one habitat.
The back ground articles are as follows.
Chesil Bank,Longshore Drift and Smugglers
Salt spreading on roads and coastal wildflowers
The ecology articles are.
Sand Dunes; Final Stages of dune succession.
Salt Marshes; The Algal stage.
Salt Marshes; The Middle Marsh
Shingle; Introduction; Types of Shingle formations
There is also a section where I describe some of the coastal habitats that I have visited.
Beachley Foreshore, Gloucestershire
Llantwit Major, Glamorganshire, South Wales
South Stack,Holy Island, Angelsey
Rhoscolyn, Holy Island Angelsey,
