Plant identification

A very friendly guy at a local nursery was able to identify some of our plants very easily because he had helped plant some of them for the previous owners.

This one, formerly described as "Twiggy tree," is Sea-buckthorn. The berries are apparently a fine source of Vitamin C, and oils from the berries were supposedly used by Russian cosmonauts, or so they say. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_buckthorn

This one, previously described as "Non-tasty unidentified plant thing" has now been identified as a species of manroot. "The anthropomorphic common names 'manroot' & 'old man' derive from the swollen lobes and arm-like extensions of the unearthed tuber. On old plants, the tuber can be several meters long and weigh in excess of 100kg."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marah_(plant)