The Original Mystery Plant
Dr. John Nelson

Photo by Linda Lee

The Mystery Plant is for the fiddler crabs, sandpipers, snails, and everybody and everything else that lives in or enjoys our beautiful coastal estuaries. It's a plant of open salt flats or meadows landward of the beach, places that tend to be frequently flooded by salt water during high tide, and drained when the tide goes out. These sorts of places are fascinating biologically, and there are plenty of natural history stories to be investigated.

The Mystery Plant is technically a small shrub and is a bit woody, at least on larger individuals. It is fairly common from New England all the way to Mexico, also occurring along much of the California coastline. The smooth, somewhat brittle stems tend to be upright as well as sprawling and come up from buried rhizomes. There are no real leaves to look at, and the whole plant is usually bright green, sometimes a bit red. This plant features succulence as a survival attribute, and it stores plenty of water in its tissues. The plants' tissues are not only good at storing water, they contain a considerable amount of salt. Plants adapted to habitats containing high concentrations of salt, whether at the coast or farther inland, are termed halophytes and generally feature complicated physiologies enabling them to endure life in a salty place.

The branches look segmented. The segments represent nodes up and down the stem, and the intervening internodes are a bit swollen and fleshy. Sometimes a stem will have a kind of beaded appearance. There are no real leaves to see, only scale- like places at each node. The nodes are opposite each other. At the upper end of a given node, three tiny white flowers will be embedded within the tissue, just barely visible when they open up.

Growing on a tidal salt flat is a very harsh environment for all the residents involved. There's high solar radiation, high salt content in the soil, and there is all that tidal influence. The Mystery Plant's neighbors, a variety of unrelated species, have adopted a similar look. The plant is edible, belonging to the same plant family (Chenopodiaceae), which gives us spinach and beets.