Scurvy Grass: What It Is, What It Really Does, and How to Use It Safely

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Scurvy grass is not a grass, and it will not cure much of anything except the disease it is named after. What it is: a small, fleshy, peppery member of the cabbage family that grows along northern European coastlines, carries a useful amount of vitamin C, and once helped keep sailors alive on long voyages. That is a genuinely good résumé for a plant. It is also, honestly, where the evidence for scurvy grass stops — and knowing where that line sits will serve you better than another borrowed list of benefits.

What scurvy grass actually is

The plant most people mean is Cochlearia officinalis, common scurvy grass or spoonwort. It belongs to the Brassicaceae — the cabbage and mustard family — which makes it a relative of broccoli, kale, radish, horseradish, wasabi and watercress [Linus Pauling Institute on cruciferous vegetables, 2017].

Both of its names are descriptive. Cochlearia comes from the Greek word for a spoon, after the shape of the leaves, which is also where the English name spoonwort comes from. Officinalis is monastic Latin for “of the medicinal storeroom” — Linnaeus applied it to plants that were already standard apothecary stock [Botanical Society of Scotland, scurvy-grass profile, 2024].

It is a coastal European plant. Kew’s Plants of the World Online lists its native range as northern and western Europe: Britain, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Baltic states, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Faroes and northern European Russia. It is a biennial or perennial of temperate habitats, introduced in a handful of other places including Italy, Spain and the Falkland Islands [Kew Plants of the World Online, Cochlearia officinalis, 2026].

It is not native to North America — and this matters if you are reading in the United States. The Cochlearia you could plausibly encounter here is a different species, Cochlearia groenlandica, Greenland scurvygrass, which is native to Alaska and the Aleutians, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and northern California, as well as Greenland, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Labrador, Québec and Newfoundland [Kew Plants of the World Online, Cochlearia groenlandica, 2026]. So a US reader searching for scurvy grass is usually reading about a European plant while standing somewhere it does not grow.

Physically, common scurvy grass runs from about 5 to 50 cm tall, with glossy, somewhat succulent, usually kidney-shaped leaves and white flowers larger than 5 mm across. On the flowering stems, the leaves clasp the stem at the base [Botanical Society of Scotland, scurvy-grass profile, 2024].

The flavour is the giveaway. Crush a leaf and you get mustard heat, which is the family signature. Cruciferous plants store sulfur compounds called glucosinolates in one place and an enzyme called myrosinase in another; damage the tissue by chopping or chewing and the two meet, producing the sharp isothiocyanates you taste in horseradish and wasabi [Linus Pauling Institute on cruciferous vegetables, 2017]. The glucosinolate that acts as a chemical marker for the Cochlearia genus is glucocochlearin [Dauvergne et al., Carbohydrate Research, 2006 — UNVERIFIED].

How to tell it apart from its close relatives

The species you are far more likely to see in Europe today is Danish scurvygrass, Cochlearia danica. It is an annual rather than a biennial or perennial, much smaller — often just a few centimetres, rarely over 20 — with flowers of 3 to 5 mm that are frequently pale lilac rather than white, and stem leaves that are stalked instead of clasping [Botanical Society of Scotland, scurvy-grass profile, 2024].

Its recent history is remarkable. Danish scurvygrass is salt-tolerant, and since the 1980s it has followed winter road-gritting inland from the coast across Europe, colonising verges and motorway central reservations. In April and May, whole stretches of British motorway median turn lilac with it [Botanical Society of Scotland, scurvy-grass profile, 2024]. That is a lovely piece of botany and a terrible foraging tip: a plant thriving in a de-icing-salt corridor is growing in road runoff.

Worth knowing before you trust any identification: the two species hybridise where they overlap, and the C. officinalis group is variable enough that specialists have argued for decades about whether its regional forms are separate species at all [Botanical Society of Scotland, scurvy-grass profile, 2024]. If professional botanists find this genus hard, treat your own field ID with humility.

The vitamin C story: the one claim that holds up

Scurvy is what happens when the body runs out of vitamin C. Ascorbic acid is a required cofactor for collagen synthesis, so a prolonged shortage means connective tissue and blood vessels literally stop being built properly. Signs can appear within about a month of intake below roughly 10 mg a day [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025], and typically show up somewhere in a 4-to-12-week window [Maxfield et al., StatPearls review of vitamin C deficiency, 2023].

What it looks like: fatigue and malaise first, then inflamed and bleeding gums, pinpoint bleeding into the skin, bruising, purpura, joint pain, poor wound healing, thickened rough skin, and the corkscrew-shaped body hairs that are close to diagnostic. Teeth loosen. Iron-deficiency anaemia often follows. Left untreated, scurvy kills [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025].

This is the disease that gave the plant its name. Sailors on long voyages, with no fresh produce, got it in devastating numbers, and coastal communities who ate Cochlearia did not. In 1747, aboard HMS Salisbury, the naval surgeon James Lind ran the trial that settled it: oranges and lemons cured scurvy, while vinegar, mustard and garlic did nothing [Botanical Society of Scotland, scurvy-grass profile, 2024]. The active compound itself was not identified until 1932 [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025].

So the honest version of the claim is this: scurvy grass worked because it contained vitamin C, in a context where nothing else on board did. Any sufficiently vitamin-C-rich plant would have done the same job.

One caveat you should hear directly. I was not able to find a reliable, published laboratory value for the vitamin C content of fresh C. officinalis leaves. Specific milligram-per-100-gram figures circulate online for this plant; I could not trace any of them to a source worth citing, so this page does not repeat one. Treat any precise number you see for scurvy grass with suspicion until someone shows you the assay.

Who still gets scurvy in the United States

It is rare here, but it is not a museum piece. The people who turn up with it tend to share one of a familiar set of circumstances [Maxfield et al., StatPearls review of vitamin C deficiency, 2023]:

• Very limited diets — food insecurity, social isolation, so-called “tea and toast” eating patterns, food faddism
• Alcohol or substance use disorders
• Eating disorders, including highly selective eating
• Malabsorption — inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, cystic fibrosis — or a history of bariatric surgery
• Hemodialysis, which increases renal losses
• Restrictive diets driven by allergies or developmental conditions
• Infants fed evaporated or boiled cow’s milk rather than breast milk or formula

Smoking matters too: people who smoke consistently run lower plasma and white-cell vitamin C, and regular secondhand smoke exposure lowers levels as well [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025].

The reassuring part is how fast treatment works. Fatigue, aches and appetite usually improve within about 24 hours of starting vitamin C. Bruising, gum bleeding and weakness typically respond over one to two weeks, corkscrew hairs normalise within roughly a month, and most symptoms clear within three months. Adult replacement doses in the literature run around 500 to 1,000 mg a day [Maxfield et al., StatPearls review of vitamin C deficiency, 2023]. That is a diagnosis and a prescription, though — not a plan to run on your own with a wild plant.

What the evidence supports about scurvy grass — and what it doesn’t

Older herbal texts credit this plant with a long list of actions. Here is where each of them actually stands.

Claim you’ll see	What the evidence actually shows
Relieves scurvy / corrects vitamin C deficiency	Strong — for vitamin C. Vitamin C reliably and rapidly reverses scurvy, and scurvy grass contains vitamin C. The strength of this evidence belongs to the nutrient, not to the plant.
A useful dietary source of vitamin C	Plausible but unquantified. It is a leafy crucifer, and crucifers are recognised sources of vitamin C, folate and vitamin K. No trustworthy per-serving figure for this species could be located.
Stimulates metabolism	No supporting evidence in humans was found for this plant.
Stimulates appetite and gastric secretions; helps bloating and slow digestion	Traditional use only. Pungent, bitter greens have a long history as appetisers across many cuisines; there are no human trials of scurvy grass for any digestive complaint.
Diuretic and “depurative”; clears uric acid; helps gout, rheumatism and arthritis	No human evidence was found. These claims trace to historical humoral theory rather than to any study, and gout and arthritis have effective medical treatments that should not be delayed.
Applied to the skin as a warming compress for inflamed joints	Traditional use only, and worth actively avoiding. Isothiocyanates are the plant’s chemical defence compounds and are highly reactive (LPI, 2017); there is no evidence a compress helps a joint, and no good reason to test a mustard-family irritant on your own skin.
Cancer prevention, as a cruciferous vegetable	Genuinely mixed — see below.

The cruciferous vegetable question

Because scurvy grass is a crucifer, it inherits the family’s most interesting research question. Meta-analyses have found higher cruciferous vegetable intake associated with lower risk of bladder, breast, colorectal, endometrial, gastric, lung, ovarian, pancreatic, prostate and renal cancers. But the pattern is not uniform: in subgroup analyses those inverse associations generally hold when case-control studies are pooled and generally do not hold when prospective cohort studies are pooled. Case-control designs are vulnerable to selection and dietary recall bias, and cooking method — which strongly affects how much of the active compounds you actually absorb — usually was not recorded [Linus Pauling Institute on cruciferous vegetables, 2017].

Read that as: a diet rich in cruciferous vegetables is a good idea for many reasons, and the specific anticancer case remains open. It is not a reason to eat a rare coastal herb.

How much vitamin C you actually need

This is the practical question underneath most searches for scurvy grass, so here are the real numbers [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025].

Group	Recommended Dietary Allowance
Men, 19+	90 mg/day
Women, 19+	75 mg/day
Pregnancy, 19+	85 mg/day
Breastfeeding, 19+	120 mg/day
People who smoke	An extra 35 mg/day on top of the above
Tolerable Upper Intake Level, adults	2,000 mg/day from food and supplements combined

Meeting that is not hard. Half a cup of raw sweet red pepper supplies about 95 mg. Three-quarters of a cup of orange juice, about 93 mg. A medium orange, 70 mg. A kiwifruit, 64 mg. Half a cup of cooked broccoli, 51 mg. Five varied servings of fruit and vegetables a day can deliver more than 200 mg [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025]. If you want a longer list, see this site’s guide to vitamin C rich foods.

Two practical notes. Vitamin C is water-soluble and heat-sensitive, so prolonged storage and cooking both cut the content of a food — steaming or microwaving loses less than boiling [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025]. And overt deficiency requires intake below about 10 mg a day for weeks, which is a long way below the RDA. Falling short of 90 mg is common; developing scurvy is not.

How to eat scurvy grass, if you can get it

Realistically, most US readers will not. It is a wild northern European coastal plant, not a supermarket green, and it is not sold as a supplement in any form worth recommending. If you do have access — through legal coastal foraging in its native range, or a specialty grower — treat it as a peppery salad herb, in the same quantities you would use watercress or arugula. A garnish, not a bowl.

• Raw is the sensible default. The mustard heat only develops when the leaf is crushed or chewed and myrosinase reaches the glucosinolates, and vitamin C degrades with heat. Boiling both inactivates that enzyme and leaches glucosinolates out far more than steaming, microwaving or stir-frying do [Linus Pauling Institute on cruciferous vegetables, 2017].
• Wash it properly. Wild greens from coastal or wetland ground can carry soil, animal droppings and parasites. Rinse thoroughly in clean running water.
• Skip the daily-glass-of-juice routine. Concentrating any pungent brassica into a large daily drink is a different exposure from eating a few leaves, and nobody has studied it in this plant.
• Don’t put it on your skin. There is no evidence behind the traditional compress, and the compounds responsible for the heat are reactive irritants.

If your actual goal is vitamin C rather than the experience of eating a historically interesting plant, a red pepper does the job better, cheaper and more predictably. Scurvy grass is worth eating because it is delicious and unusual, and because it connects you to a real story. That is a perfectly good reason on its own.

Safety: side effects, interactions, and who should be cautious

There is no clinical safety literature on scurvy grass as a remedy — no trials, no dosing studies, no documented adverse-event profile. Everything below is therefore reasoning from what is known about the food category and about vitamin C, and it should be read as caution rather than as established fact about this species.

Foraging is the biggest risk here

For a plant this benign as a food, the real hazards are where it grew and whether you have correctly identified it.

• Never eat a wild plant you cannot identify to species with confidence. Small white-flowered plants are a crowded field, this genus hybridises, and even specialists disagree about its boundaries.
• Never harvest from road verges, medians or parking-lot edges. That is precisely the habitat Danish scurvygrass has colonised, and it is a de-icing-salt and vehicle-runoff corridor.
• Avoid coastal sites near storm drains, outfalls, marinas or industrial frontage.
• Check local rules. Foraging is restricted or prohibited in many US parks and protected coastal areas, and some Cochlearia populations are locally scarce.

Thyroid function

Cruciferous vegetables produce compounds that can, in principle, interfere with the thyroid: goitrin from progoitrin, and thiocyanate ions from indole glucosinolates, which compete with iodine for uptake. In practice the effect is small. Increased thiocyanate exposure from cruciferous vegetables does not appear to raise hypothyroidism risk unless iodine intake is also low, and in one human study 150 g a day of cooked Brussels sprouts for four weeks produced no adverse effect on thyroid function [Linus Pauling Institute on cruciferous vegetables, 2017]. More broadly, dietary goitrogens are generally not clinically important unless consumed in large amounts or combined with iodine deficiency [Linus Pauling Institute on iodine, 2024].

Practical version: a garnish of scurvy grass is not a thyroid problem. If you have a thyroid condition and eat large amounts of raw crucifers on a low-iodine diet, that is a conversation to have with your clinician.

Medications

• Warfarin and similar anticoagulants. Green leafy vegetables are the main dietary source of vitamin K1, and people taking warfarin need their vitamin K intake to stay consistent, because sudden increases or decreases can shift the drug’s effect in either direction [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin K fact sheet, 2021]. No measured vitamin K value for Cochlearia could be found, so the safe assumption is that a leafy brassica contains some. Adding a new green to your routine — or dropping one — is worth mentioning to whoever manages your INR.
• Vitamin C supplements: sources genuinely disagree. The StatPearls review states that vitamin C’s antioxidant properties can interfere with chemotherapy and also with warfarin, statins and niacin [Maxfield et al., StatPearls review of vitamin C deficiency, 2023]. The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements interactions section names chemotherapy and radiation, and statin–niacin therapy, but does not list warfarin [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025]. That is a real disagreement between two reputable sources rather than a settled fact in either direction, and it is a good reason to ask your pharmacist rather than to guess.
• Chemotherapy and radiation. Whether antioxidant supplements help or hinder cancer treatment is unresolved; ODS advises talking to your oncologist before taking vitamin C or other antioxidants, especially at high doses [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025].

High-dose vitamin C, separately from the plant

If reading about scurvy grass has you reaching for a supplement bottle, know the limits. Vitamin C has low toxicity, but high doses commonly cause diarrhoea, nausea and abdominal cramps. High intakes raise urinary oxalate and uric acid excretion, with the clearest kidney-stone risk in people who already have hyperoxaluria. In hereditary haemochromatosis, chronic high doses can worsen iron overload. The upper limit for adults is 2,000 mg a day [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025].

Pregnancy and breastfeeding

There is no safety data on scurvy grass in pregnancy or lactation. Not reassuring data — no data. The honest position is that nobody knows, which is reason enough to keep it to ordinary food amounts or leave it alone entirely while pregnant or nursing.

Two related points. Vitamin C requirements rise in pregnancy (85 mg/day) and breastfeeding (120 mg/day), and the 2,000 mg upper limit still applies [NIH Office of Dietary Supplements, vitamin C fact sheet, 2025]. And iodine needs are higher in both states [Linus Pauling Institute on iodine, 2024] — one more reason not to make raw crucifers a large part of the diet during those months.

Who should skip it

• Anyone who is pregnant or breastfeeding
• Young children
• Anyone taking warfarin or another vitamin K antagonist, unless their clinician says otherwise
• Anyone with a thyroid condition who already eats a lot of raw cruciferous vegetables, or whose iodine intake is low
• Anyone with a known allergy or sensitivity to brassicas or mustard
• Anyone who cannot identify the plant to species with certainty, or who is unsure of the site it grew on

Red flags: when to see a doctor

Self-care is not the answer to any of these. Make an appointment with a primary care doctor, or go to urgent care, if you notice:

• Gums that bleed easily, are swollen and spongy, or teeth that have become loose
• Pinpoint red or purple spots in the skin, especially clustered around hair follicles on the legs, or bruising with no clear cause
• Wounds or sores that will not heal
• Persistent deep aching in the legs or joints — or, in a child, a limp or refusal to bear weight
• Unexplained fatigue alongside a very restricted diet, a malabsorption condition, or heavy alcohol use

Go to an emergency room or call 911 for bleeding you cannot control, shortness of breath, chest pain, fainting or confusion. Advanced vitamin C deficiency can involve haemolysis, jaundice, seizures and organ failure, and sudden death is documented [Maxfield et al., StatPearls review of vitamin C deficiency, 2023] — this is a condition treated with prescribed vitamin C under supervision, and it responds quickly once treatment starts.

Diagnosis is clinical: your medical history, a physical examination and a rapid response to vitamin C. Blood levels can be measured, but they mostly reflect recent intake rather than tissue stores, so a normal-looking result does not rule scurvy out [Maxfield et al., StatPearls review of vitamin C deficiency, 2023].

Health Disclaimer: This article is for general education. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for diagnosis or treatment by a qualified healthcare professional who knows your history. Wild plants are not a treatment for any disease. If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, take prescription medication — particularly anticoagulants — have a thyroid, kidney or blood condition, or are considering vitamin C supplements above the recommended intake, talk with your doctor or pharmacist first. If you think you or your child may have a vitamin C deficiency, see a clinician: it is straightforward to diagnose and it responds quickly to proper treatment.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. “Vitamin C — Health Professional Fact Sheet.” NIH ODS, updated July 31, 2025. View source
2. National Institutes of Health, Office of Dietary Supplements. “Vitamin K — Health Professional Fact Sheet.” NIH ODS, updated March 29, 2021. View source
3. Maxfield L, Daley SF, Crane JS. “Vitamin C Deficiency.” StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; last updated November 12, 2023. Bookshelf ID NBK493187; PMID 29630239. View source
4. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. “Cochlearia officinalis L.” Plants of the World Online, 2026. IPNI 281469-1. View source
5. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. “Cochlearia groenlandica L.” Plants of the World Online, 2026. IPNI 62470-2. View source
6. Higdon J, Drake VJ, Delage B. “Cruciferous Vegetables.” Linus Pauling Institute Micronutrient Information Center, Oregon State University; written 2005, updated December 2016, reviewed April 2017 by Maria Traka, PhD. View source
7. Higdon J, Drake VJ. “Iodine.” Linus Pauling Institute Micronutrient Information Center, Oregon State University; updated May 2024, reviewed June 2024 by Elizabeth N. Pearce, MD, MSc. View source
8. Grace J, with Jeffree C and Milne R. “Plant of the Week, 1st April 2024 — Scurvy-grass (Cochlearia officinalis and C. danica).” Botany in Scotland, Botanical Society of Scotland, March 31, 2024. View source
9. Dauvergne X, Cérantola S, Salaün S, Magné C, Kervarec N, Bessièrs M, Deslandes E. “General occurrence of the glucosinolate glucocochlearin within the Cochlearia genus.” Carbohydrate Research, 2006; 341: 2166–2169. PMID 16764844. View source