Photo: Laminariasetchellii.jpg: jkirkhart35 derivative work: Bff (talk), CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Scouler's Surfgrass

Phyllospadix scouleri

Also known as Surfgrass, Surf grass, Scouler's surf-grass

At a glance

Family

Zosteraceae (eelgrass family)

Type

Marine flowering plant (seagrass), not an alga

Parts used

None established for eating or herbal use; blades historically gathered for practical, non-medicinal purposes

Size

Ribbon-like blades to about 1 meter long and only 2 to 3 millimeters wide, growing in dense tufts anchored by tough rhizomes

Bloom

Late winter into spring, with tiny flowers hidden inside the leaf sheaths and pollen released to drift underwater

Habitat

Wave-battered rocky shores and shallow subtidal reefs of the open Pacific coast, from Alaska down to Baja California

Acquisition

Forage

This plant in HerbSense

Traditional uses

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Scouler's surfgrass is not a kitchen or medicine cabinet herb. It is a true flowering plant that returned to the sea millions of years ago, and along the Pacific coast it has long mattered to people in practical rather than medicinal ways. Coastal Indigenous communities are documented to have used the tough, fibrous blades of surfgrass and its estuarine cousin eelgrass for everyday needs such as lining steaming pits, packing and cushioning food or goods, stuffing bedding, and thatching, prizing the leaves for their strength and salt tolerance rather than for eating or healing. Its greater story is ecological: surfgrass meadows stabilize wave-swept rock, buffer the shoreline, and shelter countless small fish, snails, and crustaceans, making it one of the quiet architects of a healthy rocky coast.

How to grow & use it

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Choose it when

“For the rocks that wear green hair combed flat by every incoming wave, and never once go dry at heart.”

Did you know?

Surfgrass is one of the very few flowering plants on Earth that lives fully submerged in open seawater and pollinates underwater, releasing long thread-like pollen grains that drift on the current to find a mate, an adaptation almost unheard of outside this small group of marine seagrasses.

Safety

Not an established food or medicine, and as a marine plant it may carry pollutants, so it shouldn't be eaten.