About tidefinds
Welcome to tidefinds!
​
A site where you will find dried seaweed pictures for sale, made by myself. Each picture is crafted from responsibly sourced seaweeds that I have collected from beaches across South West England.
I do not and will never remove weeds that are still growing, or are still attached to rocks. Once I have thoroughly dried the seaweeds, I place them together in a way that I feel is creative and pleasing to the eye.
My intention is to showcase this wonderful ocean plant life, in a picturesque way, for all to enjoy and feel calmed by. I hope you like browsing through them!
About Me
Let me share a little bit about myself with you.
​
I'm Sarah, a wife and grandmother from Devon, South West England, where I live happily with my husband and our two cats. We are fortunate enough to live in a beautiful part of the World, situated between Dartmoor and the South Coast of Devon.
When I was growing up in Devon, we owned a caravan site, next to the river Teign. My parents installed an outside swimming pool on that caravan site and it was there that my lifetime passion for swimming was born. I taught myself to swim in that pool at the tender age of six years old and I have been swimming ever since! Fast forward fifty-ish years and I am still swimming, whenever I can.
​
I love to plan days off to beaches and coves, starting with a walk, then rewarding myself with a swim and then a beach clean. It is because of these beach cleans, whilst I'm looking down, that I have started to collect seaweeds. I think they are truly beautiful and help to remind me of each time I have been fortunate enough to experience another day connecting with nature.
My hope is that you will also appreciate the natural forms of the weeds and want to add a small piece of South West England to your home. Thank you for browsing.
Creating Sustainable Art
It's important to me that my collecting seaweeds is not having a detrimental effect on our shorelines. With this in mind, I contacted Plymouth University Marine Institute in Devon, to ask them this question. Here is their response:
​​
Hi Sarah,
The removal of seaweed detritus (wrack) is unlikely to have any real-world implications, especially at the kind of level you are referring to.
​
The growth rate and productivity of the main brown seaweed species around our shores are truly prodigious, in the order of magnitude of a tonne of seaweed can be produced and die in each linear metre of rocky shore coastline over the course of a year. A lot of this productivity is highly seasonal meaning that when there’s a glut of dead weed, it really is present in large quantities and a significant proportion of the mass is washed up on strandlines where it is consumed by flies, beetles and other terrestrial species which translocate the mass from the marine fringe to the fully terrestrial realm. All you would be doing is contributing to this translocation.
Humans have been collecting seaweeds for use as fertiliser and soil conditioner for millennia, some of the most endangered ecotypes in Britain, such as the machair grasslands of the Hebridean Isles, are strongly linked to the use of seaweed fertilisers. Of course there is an issue with removal of biological matter from the Marine National Park, where strictly the legislation prohibits the removal of materials of marine origin, but outside of the National Park I believe that only commercial collection of material would be deemed unlawful. In essence, to be honest, no ecological impact of a carrier bag full of detached seaweed would be felt.
Thank you very much for enquiring about your impact, which is an important consideration for all of us.
​
Kind regards,
Dr Martha Hall
Project Manager
Marine Institute | University of Plymouth | Drake Circus | Plymouth | PL4 8AA
