What sea buckthorn is

Hippophae rhamnoides is a deciduous shrub in the family Elaeagnaceae. It grows two to four metres tall in most places, carries narrow silver-green leaves and long woody thorns, and bears dense clusters of small orange berries that sit tight against the branch. In English it is sea buckthorn. In Ladakh it is tsermang or chharma; across India it is often sold simply as Leh berry.

It grows where almost nothing else does

The plant's range runs across the cold, dry belt of Eurasia — from the Himalayan and Tibetan plateau through Mongolia, Central Asia, Russia and into northern and central Europe. In India it is concentrated in Ladakh, Lahaul-Spiti, Kinnaur, the upper reaches of Uttarakhand and parts of Sikkim, mostly between 2,500 and 4,500 metres.

Three traits let it hold ground that defeats other fruit:

• It fixes its own nitrogen. Sea buckthorn roots host Frankia bacteria in nodules, so the shrub makes its own nitrogen supply and can colonise gravel, scree and riverbed sand with no topsoil worth the name.
• It tolerates extreme cold. Established plants survive well below −30 °C, which is why it persists on ground that freezes for months.
• It holds soil. The root system spreads aggressively and suckers, which is why it is planted deliberately for erosion control on Himalayan slopes and degraded land.

That hardiness is not incidental to the fruit. A plant that survives intense UV at altitude, wide temperature swings and drought invests heavily in protective chemistry — the carotenoids, flavonoids and vitamin C that make the berry interesting are part of how the shrub copes with where it lives.

Why nobody eats it raw

The berry is sharply acidic and astringent — edible, but not pleasant by the handful. It is also awkward to harvest: the fruit is soft, it sits directly on thorned branches, and it bursts if handled roughly. Traditional harvesting often meant cutting whole branches, or waiting for a hard frost and shaking the fruit loose.

So sea buckthorn has always been a processed food rather than a table fruit. Juice, pressed oil, dried berries, syrup, jam and tea are the forms it has taken for centuries, and they are still the forms it takes now.

A long record of use

The plant appears in Tibetan medical literature and in Mongolian and Chinese traditional practice, where both the fruit and the leaf were used. Its genus name carries its own piece of folklore: Hippophae comes from the Greek for "shining horse", from the old practice of feeding the leaves to horses and the observation that their coats improved.

In the twentieth century the serious work was Soviet. Russian institutes studied the berry and its oil from the 1940s onward, cultivated it at scale, and used preparations of it in clinical and occupational settings — including, by widely repeated accounts, in the diet and skin preparations of the cosmonaut programme.

In India, the Defence Research and Development Organisation's high-altitude laboratory at Leh has worked on sea buckthorn for decades, with the practical question of nutrition and recovery for troops posted at altitude driving the interest.

Pulp, seed and leaf are three different materials

This distinction matters more than any other when reading a label, so it is worth fixing early:

• Pulp and peel give the juice and the pulp oil. This is where omega 7 (palmitoleic acid) and the carotenoids are concentrated. Pulp oil is deep orange-red.
• Seed gives a lighter oil, richer in omega 3 and omega 6 and in vitamin E, and much lower in omega 7.
• Leaf is used for tea and extract, and carries flavonoids rather than oil.

A product described only as "sea buckthorn oil" could be either oil, and they are not interchangeable. Biosash sells them separately — a berry oil capsule and a seed oil capsule — which is the honest way to do it.