The Botanical Archives No. 004: The Orange Berry of the North

Sea buckthorn, shining horses and a botanical journey across Eurasia.

Along the windswept coasts of northern Europe, sea buckthorn can look as though it belongs entirely to the landscape in which it stands. Its narrow silver-grey leaves withstand salt-laden air, its thorny branches form dense thickets against exposed ground, and as summer gives way to autumn those branches become crowded with berries of such intense yellow and orange that they appear almost luminous against an overcast northern sky. It would be easy, looking at sea buckthorn growing among European dunes, to imagine that this is fundamentally a plant of the cold northern coast, and its English name encourages precisely that interpretation.

Yet Hippophae rhamnoides has a much larger geographical and cultural story. Its native distribution stretches from the Atlantic edges of Europe through Central Asia and southern Siberia towards China, crossing mountains, river valleys, steppes and continental landscapes as well as coastlines, and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew records a native range including Britain, Belgium and Scandinavia in the west and Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Pakistan and China further east. Across that enormous territory, people encountered the same remarkable plant under very different circumstances: some ate its acidic fruits, some used its leaves as animal feed, and others incorporated berries, oils or other preparations into traditional systems of medicine. In the twentieth century scientists began separating the fruit into chemical fractions, and by the twenty-first sea buckthorn had travelled again, this time into nutritional supplements, functional foods and expensive bottles of orange cosmetic oil. The journey from thorny Eurasian shrub to fashionable skincare ingredient is therefore much older and more complicated than the contemporary language of superberries and omega-7 suggests. This is the story behind the ingredient whose chemistry and evidence we examine in the Sea Buckthorn monograph.

A plant that refuses easy geography

The natural history of sea buckthorn begins with resilience. It belongs to the Elaeagnaceae, a family of woody plants that includes species capable of thriving where soil fertility, water or exposure make life difficult, and sea buckthorn itself is remarkably adaptable, found around coastal dunes and shingle, beside rivers, across valleys and in mountainous regions. Its success is not simply a matter of toughness above ground: it forms a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria of the genus Frankia, so that through root nodules atmospheric nitrogen can be converted into biologically useful forms, helping the plant establish in nutrient-poor soils, while its extensive root system stabilises loose ground. These characteristics would eventually make it valuable for erosion control and ecological restoration as well as food and medicine.

These characteristics help explain the geographical breadth of its human story, because sea buckthorn did not need people to create comfortable agricultural conditions before it could become useful to them. It was already present in difficult landscapes, producing fruit where other resources might be limited, and for the communities living alongside it the plant offered several possibilities at once: the berries could become food, leaves and young material could contribute to fodder, oils and extracts could enter traditional preparations, and the shrub itself could stabilise ground and form dense protective growth. Long before anyone knew what palmitoleic acid or a carotenoid was, people already knew that sea buckthorn was useful.

The shining horse

Few stories surrounding sea buckthorn have proved as enduring as the explanation traditionally given for its botanical name. The genus Hippophae is commonly interpreted through the Greek words for horse and for shining or brightness, from which has developed the familiar story that the ancient Greeks fed sea buckthorn leaves to horses and observed that the animals developed particularly glossy coats, so that the plant became associated with the idea of the shining horse. It is an irresistible piece of botanical history, perhaps a little too irresistible, and versions of it are repeated across ingredient descriptions and botanical literature with far greater certainty than the surviving evidence warrants, sometimes embellished further by linking sea buckthorn with the horses of Alexander the Great.

The problem is not that these stories are impossible, because sea buckthorn has certainly been associated with animal fodder and its range places it within cultures possessing long traditions of horse husbandry. The difficulty is the familiar one encountered throughout ethnobotanical history: a plausible tradition repeated often enough that the repetition itself begins to resemble documentation. The Botanical Archives takes a more cautious view, treating the etymological tradition as a genuine part of the plant’s cultural history while regarding the increasingly elaborate cavalry stories as folklore unless supported by stronger primary evidence. That does not make the story worthless, because folklore tells us something different from chemistry: it reveals how humans remembered plants and which stories proved compelling enough to survive across generations. For sea buckthorn, the horse has remained beside the orange berry for centuries.

Medicine across the roof of the world

As the geographical story moves eastwards, sea buckthorn enters one of the richest parts of its ethnobotanical history. The plant has longstanding associations with Tibetan traditional medicine, where different preparations were used within a much broader materia medica, and modern ethnopharmacological reviews describe applications involving digestion, respiratory complaints, circulation, inflammation and disorders of the skin and mucous membranes, while Chinese and Mongolian traditions likewise incorporated it, though the preparations, terminology and indications varied. This history deserves more than the familiar modern sentence that sea buckthorn has been used in Tibetan medicine for thousands of years, because traditional medical systems were not primitive versions of modern pharmacology waiting to be explained; they developed their own classifications of illness, preparation methods and understandings of the body, and translating one traditional term directly into a contemporary biomedical diagnosis can distort the historical practice.

It is more useful to recognise that communities across parts of Asia repeatedly considered sea buckthorn worth collecting, preparing and preserving, and the harsh environments in which some of these traditions developed help explain its significance: a fruit-producing shrub capable of surviving high altitude, low temperatures and poor soils represented a valuable resource. Modern science has since identified vitamin C, carotenoids, tocopherols, fatty acids, phytosterols, flavonoids and numerous other compounds across the fruits, seeds and leaves, and it is tempting to look backwards and declare that traditional practitioners somehow knew the chemistry. That would be a distortion of a different kind, because they knew the plant, through observation, practice and inherited experience rather than chromatography. The fascination lies in allowing the two histories to meet without pretending they are the same, exactly the approach we take with the ingredient’s chemistry today.

A berry that is difficult to ignore

The fruit itself helps explain why sea buckthorn repeatedly entered human culture, because it is visually extraordinary. As the berries ripen, female plants can become so densely covered that their branches appear studded with orange beads, and against silver-green foliage and grey northern landscapes the effect is dramatic. Unlike softer cultivated berries, however, sea buckthorn does not make harvesting easy: the fruits sit tightly against thorn-bearing branches and rupture when handled, and their flavour is intensely acidic, so this was never destined to become a berry eaten casually by the handful. Processing made far more sense, and across different regions sea buckthorn consequently became juice, syrup, preserves, sauces and fermented products, with sugar tempering the formidable acidity and processing allowing a short seasonal harvest to be preserved.

The modern rediscovery of sea buckthorn as a superfood can make these products appear newly invented, when in reality contemporary juices and powders belong to a much longer history of humans solving the practical problem posed by an abundant, nutritious but challenging fruit. What has changed is the vocabulary: where an earlier generation might simply have known that the berries were valuable winter food, contemporary consumers encounter measurements of vitamin C, carotenoids, polyphenols and antioxidant capacity. The fruit has not suddenly become nutritious; we have acquired new ways of describing why.

From household remedy to laboratory subject

The twentieth century transformed the sea buckthorn story. Across Russia, the Soviet Union, China, India and northern Europe, researchers increasingly investigated the plant using the tools of modern chemistry, nutrition and pharmacology, and the fruit ceased to be understood solely as food or traditional medicine and became a collection of potentially separable chemical resources: seeds could yield one oil, the fleshy fruit another, leaves could produce flavonoid-rich extracts, and juice could be analysed for vitamins, acids and phenolic compounds. This fundamentally changed what sea buckthorn meant, because traditional users encountered a plant while modern industry encountered a raw-material platform.

The distinction became particularly important when researchers examined the oils. Seed oil proved rich in linoleic and alpha-linolenic acids, while pulp oil possessed a strikingly different composition characterised by much greater concentrations of palmitic and palmitoleic acids, so one fruit was effectively producing two rather different lipid ingredients. Finnish researchers would later demonstrate this clearly in controlled studies, one of which found the seed oil contained approximately 34 per cent linoleic acid and 25 per cent alpha-linolenic acid while the pulp oil contained approximately 33 per cent palmitic acid and 25 per cent palmitoleic acid. That discovery belongs to chemistry rather than cultural history, but it profoundly influenced the plant’s modern identity: sea buckthorn was no longer merely an orange berry. It was becoming an ingredient.

The Soviet story and the Nordic laboratory

No modern history of sea buckthorn is complete without Russia and the former Soviet Union, where twentieth-century researchers and agricultural programmes developed considerable interest in the plant, selecting cultivars, expanding cultivation and investigating preparations for nutritional and medical applications including burns and tissue injury. From this period comes another of the great stories attached to sea buckthorn: the claim that its oil protected Soviet cosmonauts from radiation or was included in the space programme. The story appears repeatedly in marketing, while reliable primary documentation is considerably harder to find, so it belongs in the same category as the shining horses, part of the mythology surrounding sea buckthorn. Mythology itself is worth recording, provided we label it honestly, because a botanical archive should preserve not only what we can prove but also the stories people have chosen to tell about plants, and make clear which is which.

Northern Europe added a further chapter, because the plant grows naturally in parts of Scandinavia and suits the northern botanical imagination, and Finnish researchers became especially important in studying its composition and investigating its effects in humans. This work matters because it represents a change in the standard of evidence being applied: instead of asking whether sea buckthorn had traditionally been associated with skin conditions, researchers could compare defined seed and pulp oils, measure fatty-acid composition, recruit participants and use control groups. The results were more complicated than folklore, which is exactly what science should produce. A controlled study in people with atopic dermatitis found some changes associated with dietary oils but not the simple confirmation later marketing might have preferred, and a trial of oral sea buckthorn oil and dry-eye symptoms reported attenuation of seasonal changes in tear-film osmolarity together with some symptom differences. The important development was not that science finally proved traditional medicine correct, but that sea buckthorn had entered a different world in which a traditional remedy could now fail a trial and one fraction of the plant could behave differently from another. Uncertainty became measurable, which is one of the defining moments in the history of every medicinal botanical that survives into modern evidence-based practice.

The reinvention of the superberry

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, sea buckthorn was perfectly positioned for another transformation, because consumers had become increasingly interested in functional foods, antioxidants, omega fatty acids, natural cosmetics and ingredients associated with traditional medicine, and sea buckthorn could participate in every one of these markets simultaneously. Its colour made it instantly photographable, its northern and Himalayan associations supplied a compelling landscape, its traditional history provided authenticity, its chemistry supplied scientific vocabulary, and the relative unfamiliarity of palmitoleic acid allowed omega-7 to become a powerful point of differentiation. The modern superberry was born.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this reinvention, because sea buckthorn really is nutritionally and chemically interesting and expanding cultivation has created new markets. The difficulty is that commercial storytelling tends to flatten history, compressing Tibetan medicine, Soviet pharmacology, Scandinavian food traditions, contemporary nutritional science and cosmetic formulation into a few paragraphs whose ultimate purpose is to sell a bottle of oil, so that the plant’s genuine complexity becomes a sequence of claims. The irony is that the real story is considerably better.

Orange oil, harvest and a plant that was never only northern

Sea buckthorn’s arrival in contemporary skincare was almost inevitable, because the beauty industry has always been attracted to ingredients that combine sensory distinction with an intelligible story, and sea buckthorn possesses both: pulp oil is spectacularly orange because of its carotenoids, seed oil provides an appealing fatty-acid profile, and the plant’s survival in severe climates allows it to be positioned within the familiar language of resilience. The same plant can therefore inhabit several identities at once, from northern berry to luxury rarity to science-led active, yet the modern consumer rarely encounters the thorny shrub itself; the oil arrives smooth in a glass bottle, already separated from the landscape that produced it, even though the harvesting was not smooth and the branches are covered in thorns. This distance between plant and product is one reason the Botanical Archives exists, because botanical ingredients become more meaningful when we restore some of what industrial processing necessarily removes.

Harvesting is genuinely difficult, because the berries cling stubbornly to thorny branches and are soft when ripe, so different regions have developed different responses, from cutting and freezing branches to mechanical systems and breeding programmes that select for easier production, and each method changes the relationship between plant and crop. This matters from a sustainability perspective, because although sea buckthorn’s nitrogen-fixing roots and soil-stabilising habit genuinely make it useful in some restoration systems, sustainable biology does not guarantee a sustainable supply chain: wild harvesting can disturb natural populations, monoculture can simplify landscapes, and processing and transport consume energy. The increasingly sophisticated use of processing residues may offer one route towards improvement, and a 2026 review of sea buckthorn oil and by-product valorisation highlights opportunities to integrate the crop into a more circular bioeconomy rather than treating residues as waste, so the ancient berry has acquired yet another modern identity, as a candidate for circular manufacturing.

For Botanicals and Company, perhaps the most interesting feature of sea buckthorn’s history is the way geography continually resists the story we try to impose upon it. In Scandinavia and Britain it feels northern European, in the Himalayas it belongs to high-altitude Asian landscapes, in Tibetan medicine and in Russia it acquires different cultural identities, and in contemporary skincare it becomes an omega-rich botanical active, yet all of these identities belong to the same species and none possesses the whole story. Describing sea buckthorn simply as a Nordic superberry is attractive but incomplete, because to claim it entirely for Scandinavian aesthetics would erase much older and geographically broader traditions across Eurasia. The more respectful story is also the more interesting one: sea buckthorn is not a Scandinavian ingredient that travelled east, nor an Asian medicinal plant recently introduced to Europe, but a Eurasian species whose human history developed simultaneously in many places. The orange berry belongs to a continent.

What the archive leaves behind

When we encounter sea buckthorn today, we usually encounter a product: a small amber bottle of cold-pressed seed oil, a vivid orange serum of pulp oil, a supplement promising omega-7, a jar of preserve in a Nordic food shop. Behind all of them stands the same thorny plant, whose roots form relationships with microorganisms beneath poor soil, whose silver leaves withstand exposed landscapes, and whose branches turn orange each autumn as wind carries pollen between male and female plants. People have encountered that cycle for generations and found different reasons to value it, feeding parts of the plant to animals, preserving the berries, incorporating preparations into traditional medicine, selecting cultivars, investigating oils in laboratories, extracting individual compounds and eventually placing those compounds into cosmetics under new names.

Perhaps this is why the old story of the shining horse survives so easily. Whether every detail is historically recoverable matters less to its longevity than the image it creates, of an animal moving through a difficult landscape and encountering a plant whose leaves and berries seem to restore something that had been lost, and modern skincare has inherited much the same image, having simply replaced the shining horse with shining skin. The science demands considerably more caution than the story, but the story is still worth remembering, because before sea buckthorn became omega-7, before it became an antioxidant, before anyone measured transepidermal water loss or separated seed oil from pulp oil, it was simply a remarkable orange-fruited shrub growing across an enormous sweep of Eurasia. That is where its story should begin.

From the archive to the Library

References and further reading

• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Plants of the World Online: Hippophae rhamnoides L. POWO taxon record
• Ma, Q-G. et al. (2023). Hippophae rhamnoides L.: a comprehensive review. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 71(12), 4769-4788. doi:10.1021/acs.jafc.2c06916
• Liu, M. et al. (2026). Ethnopharmacology, phytochemistry and pharmacology of sea buckthorn: a comprehensive review. Frontiers in Pharmacology, 17, 1759697. doi:10.3389/fphar.2026.1759697
• Ciesarova, Z. et al. (2020). Why is sea buckthorn so exceptional? A review. Food Research International, 133, 109170. doi:10.1016/j.foodres.2020.109170
• Yang, B. et al. (1999). Effects of dietary supplementation with sea buckthorn seed and pulp oils on atopic dermatitis. Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, 10(11), 622-630. doi:10.1016/S0955-2863(99)00049-2
• Larmo, P.S. et al. (2010). Oral sea buckthorn oil attenuates tear film osmolarity and symptoms in individuals with dry eye. Journal of Nutrition. doi:10.3945/jn.109.118901
• From nutritional profile to circular bioeconomy: a review of sea buckthorn oil and by-product valorization (2026). Foods, 15(11), 1873. doi:10.3390/foods15111873