We have spotted sea beet on the sandy dunes near my parents’ house in Dorset. And, more recently, we’ve noticed it pushing defiantly through the shingle beach at Santa Marinella in Lazio. It’s a rugged and edible coastal plant, with glossy, gently serrated leaves, that thrives near tidelines in Europe, Africa and Asia, and it is the ancestor of all cultivated beets (or, more precisely, Beta vulgaris). Many beets are cultivated for their swollen roots: sugar beet, red beet (beetroot), and the wonderfully named mangelwurzel, or fodder beet, all of which have edible leaves, too. Others, notably spinach beet and Swiss chard, are grown primarily for their leaves and fleshy midribs. That beetroot and chard are related was a revelation almost as satisfying as discovering that the woman at the bookshop is the cousin of the man at the chemist (it’s all in the eyebrows).
In his masterpiece Nosedive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells, Harold McGee begins the soil chapter with the Roman naturalist Pliny, who thought the smell of fertile soil was the mixed breath of sun and earth. McGee then leaps 2,000 years ahead and recounts how Australian scientists named the smell of dry rock and earth being moistened petrichor, from the Greek petri (rock) and ichor (blood of the gods). Also how scientists identified the bacteria that creates volatile molecules in soil and named these particles geosmins, geō meaning “earth” and osmḗ smell.
