STOP THE DAM
Kings Beach – Let the salt be 🌊
News - 23/10/2026
Plants that deal with salt 🌿 (report from the plant group)
Report from the plant group, which is three people at the moment although one of us is away until Christmas.
We said in the statement that there are natives that absorb salt, and we have been trying to work out which ones and whether that is really what they do. The proper word for them seems to be halophytes and they don't all go about it the same way. Some keep most of the salt out at the roots, some store it in fleshy leaves, and some push it out through the leaf, which you can sometimes see as crystals on mangroves.
These are the ones that came up for around here. We have put in the Latin names because the first time we went to the nursery we came home with the wrong one.
- Pigface (Carpobrotus glaucescens), the one with thick fleshy leaves and big pink flowers that spreads along the dunes and helps hold them together.
- Coastal saltbush (Rhagodia candolleana), also called seaberry saltbush, a scrambly shrub with little red berries that grows on dunes and headlands.
- Grey saltbush (Atriplex cinerea), which has silvery leaves and can put salt into tiny bladders on the leaf.
- Samphire (Sarcocornia quinqueflora), which looks like little green fingers and grows in saltmarsh, so it's in the estuaries around here but not on a beach like Kings.
- Grey mangrove (Avicennia marina), also not at Kings, but we liked reading about it.
One of us has had a pigface in a pot on the back verandah since September and has been watering it with seawater from Lennox every second day, next to one that only gets the tap, to see if it takes anything up. So far they look about the same except the tap one has snails. We don't have any way of measuring the salt in a plant so if anyone has access to a lab please get in touch.
We haven't been able to find out how much salt these plants would actually take up. We are guessing it is less than 847 tonnes but we would like to see it looked at properly, and it would cost a lot less than $47.2 million. Please don't plant anything at Kings yourself or dig anything up because it's a nature reserve. If you want to help, talk to National Parks or your local dune care or Landcare group, and for your own garden a native nursery can tell you what suits your spot. There is more reading on our Salt Info page.