Berlin – “The sea buckthorn stood high on the beach of Hiddensee …” is the first verse of the island anthem by Hiddensee, sung by Nina Hagen, one of the singer’s most popular songs since 1974. Angela Merkel requested this song from the Bundeswehr Music Choir for her big tattoo to mark her farewell to the Chancellery. Hiddensee belongs to her constituency, here she has won her parliamentary mandate eight times. The photo that shows the young CDU direct candidate in 1990 surrounded by five men in a fisherman’s hut in the southeast of the island of Rügen went around the world.
“Micha, my Micha, and everything hurt so much …” is the second line, and the pain is now multiple, because the sea buckthorn has been dying – for years, in all of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Instead of rows of bushes with greenish silver leaves in which orange berries shine, there are now leafless and fruitless gray stalks on the slopes around the lighthouse on the Hiddensee thorn bush – a sad sight.
Maritta Tkalec
Dying sea buckthorn on Hiddensee in summer 2021. Wild forms and plantations are affected.
The scientists are puzzling. Since around 2015 they have been watching the sea buckthorn die on the now numerous plantations in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. However, the wild forms of the region are also affected. The phenomenon also occurs in Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Austria and China – bare bushes everywhere. The first suspicion fell on a fungus that was found on the examined plants, which climbs up the vessels of the sea buckthorn and clogs so that the plant can neither absorb water nor nutrients.
Many of the farmers who grew sea buckthorn berries, which are extremely rich in vitamin C, have not replanted for years, the harvests have dropped enormously, and it is no longer worth it. The first farmers are switching to walnuts and have set up appropriate plantations.
Farewell to the sea buckthorn
A research project started at the beginning of 2021 under the direction of the State Office for Agriculture, Food Safety and Fisheries in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania should finally get to the bottom of the cause and develop measures on how to save the sea buckthorn. If things continue like this, the plant that shapes the landscape of the Baltic Sea will die out.
Before the damage to the plants became visible, it was always assumed that the sea buckthorn was a very robust plant that, with its special roots, entered into a symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, through which the plant draws nutrients, even in the barren sandy soil. It is now clear that she is more sensitive than expected, for example she does not like constant moisture in the root system. But the problematic years were actually too dry rather than wet.
Farewell to the Chancellor
At the latest at the big farewell ceremony for Chancellor Angela Merkel, the hit will once again crawl into millions of ears and awaken memories, for example of a life without a mobile phone, with ORWO color films (which you could forget), an existence without all-round documentation of life. “Now nobody believes us, how nice it was here haha, haha …” sings Nina Hagen. Angela Merkel will not only have to rely on the millions of color photos from her chancellorship in order to remember. Memoirs would be nice. And hopefully hot sea buckthorn on the cooler coast.
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