Plants & Nature

Sea angelica

Tags: Flowers Description: Sea angelica is fairly common on rocky seashores, often near banks of washed-up seaweed.

Sea angelica

Tags: Flowers Description: Sea angelica is fairly common on rocky seashores, often near banks of washed-up seaweed. It grows between 50 and 150 cm tall. The stem is often reddish and the leaves are lobed, made up of several small leaflets. The flowers are fairly small and yellow-green, but many sit together in an inflorescence that is almost spherical. They have scented nectar glands that attract many insects. The plant flowers only once in its life. It spends several years building up nutrients in the root and growing large, and then suddenly one year it flowers and dies afterwards. Sea angelica has a very close relative, «Fjellkvann». The Latin name of the plant means ‘archangel’ and alludes to the belief that it was the archangel Gabriel who told people that this was a good and useful plant. Use: Angelica was a very popular trade commodity for the Vikings, and has been cultivated down through the ages. In an old law going back to the year 950 it says that ‘theft of angelica shall be punished with fines’. That says something about how important the plant was. It contains a great deal of vitamin C and has therefore helped to prevent the disease scurvy in people who did not get much vitamin C, for example the Sami and the Inuit in Greenland. Habitat type: Coast Edible: Yes Written by: Lærke Stewart

, via Wikimedia Commons](Strandkvann/Strandkvann.jpg)

Sea angelica. Photo: Robert Flogaus-Faust, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

, via Wikimedia Commons](Strandkvann/Strandkvann2.jpg)

The leaves of sea angelica. Photo: Agnieszka Kwiecień, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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