You are looking at a true living fossil—one of our most ancient plants on the earth today and still useful!
The Equisetum genus is the only living genus in this plant family, and although there are several species of Horsetail, they are pretty unmistakable!
Silicates coat their stems and make them useful for scouring items, such as cleaning pots or pans, but also as a very fine sandpaper.
Horsetail has long been used in herbal medicine, especially for hair/skin/nail health, as it is today.
The young shoots are also eaten as a vegetable, cooked or raw, somewhat like asparagus.
These plants look like they are very old—they reproduce from spores, rather than from seeds and they don’t look like ferns or any of the mosses you would normally think of as being spore-producing.
What makes them even stranger is that the leaves generally are not the photosynthetic part—the stem fulfills that function, and the leaves are lost part of the year so that the plant just looks like strange green tubes arising from pond (at least that’s what they look like to me 👽 ).
Even stranger is that they can be found in most areas of the world, only absent Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand and the islands of the Pacific.
As one might guess from this fact, Horsetail does well in the garden, as it is great in wet areas, makes an excellent pond plant, and even can tolerate drought.
Horsetail has a pattern of spacing of the nodes (where the leaves are arranged in whorls), which becomes closer and closer together as they approach the apex. Amazingly, this inspired the invention of “logarithms”…sacred geometry!!!
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*This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of such advice or treatment from a personal physician.