For any beach goer seeking the golden sands of Cefn Sidan, sea buckthorn has become as familiar as the sand dunes themselves. Whilst crossing the sand dunes to get to the beach you may do battle with the impressive thorns of individual plants that spring up here and there or be faced with an impenetrable barrier of mature sea buckthorn over 2 m tall.

Sea buckthorn has recently earned itself the reputation as a problem plant - it isn’t native to the west coast and ends up covering the entire sand dune system whilst preventing access and destroying the species rich dune grassland habitat. And to a large extent this is what has happened not only at Pembrey Burrows but also along the whole Pembrey peninsula and across the water at Pendine and Laugharne Burrows.

Sea buckthorn was originally planted here to help stabilise the sand dunes when Pembrey Forest was planted in the 1920s. However, more recent thinking has found that sand dunes are better off as mobile systems, especially if they need to move to take into account a changing environment such as rising sea levels.

So it would seem that the solution to this thorny problem would be to remove the plant from the sand dunes and restore access and the species rich grassland. However, sea buckthorn now covers such large areas that removing all of it would be very expensive. Therefore learning to live with sea buckthorn and finding ways to protect the dune grassland and access may be the only option.

At Pembrey Burrows both options have been employed. In some areas sea buckthorn has been cleared completely and grazing re-introduced for the benefit of the species rich dune grassland. In other areas where large amounts of scrub occur, some of the scrub has been retained for its own value, including sea buckthorn. In addition, in some areas the sea buckthorn has been left more or less intact. In these areas the main priority is to prevent the sea buckthorn stands from joining-up completely and retaining existing pathways through the sea buckthorn for walkers and people going to the beach.

The Millennium Coastal Park has coordinated the sea buckthorn removal programme at Pembrey Burrows since 2005 with support from the Countryside Council for Wales. This has proceeded in conjunction with a project to introduce grazing to the sand dunes. So far around 10 ha has been cleared at a cost of £50K. The sea buckthorn is left in large compost heaps which offer a home to amphibians, reptiles and small mammals. Over time the compost heaps are slowly cleared at an appropriate time of year.

The clearance programme will ensure that we retain the species rich dune habitat, whilst also learning to live with sea buckthorn. And in the future we may even learn to love it, as it happens to have many medicinal properties and edible nutrient-rich berries that are descended upon each year by fieldfare and redwing.