Horsetails and a walk 300 million years back in time

It all started on Wednesday when Frog, Dog and I went for a walk along a nearby canal. With the bird-scarer going off every fifteen minutes near home, Ellie was in a permanent tizz and it was becoming impossible to walk her around my usual routes. So we decided to go a little further afield.

    It was a glorious day and the air was full of what we would normally have called midges but decided to call mayflies as it seemed appropriate.

Swan and mayflies

Everywhere we saw baby water-birds.

I love the way these cygnets are copying their parent and preening themselves exactly as s/he is doing

Mallard pair and ducklings

A tiny black moorhen chick scooted across the canal into cover on the far bank, watched over by a noisy parent who continued screeching angrily long after the baby had disappeared into safety.

Along a shady stretch I saw my first orchids of the year, Early Purples with their leopard-print leaves

Early Purple Orchid (and Bluebells)

The leopard-print leaf of the Early Purple Orchid

and this exquisite plant which I’d never seen in Devon before but vaguely remembered seeing half a century ago on the chalky North Downs of Kent where I was brought up.

    ‘Woodruff’, I said to Frog, the name popping out of my inner directory without conscious intervention. What else could it have been called?

Woodruff

As we neared the end of the restored section of the canal, I saw this plant, with its feet firmly planted in the water.

The plant with its feet in the water 

‘Mare’s-tail,’ I said. Or was it Horsetail? I really wasn’t sure. I knew the names, but the plant I remembered lived on the land, in damp patches, like this one on the bank immediately behind the water-plant.

The plant on the bank

I also remembered Frog’s brother pointing out the land version to his young daughter and saying that it was one of the most ancient of plants, around at the time of the dinosaurs, and that intrigued me. The plants did look alike and they did both look strange - like bottlebrushes. Were they the same, with the names and habitats interchangeable? Or were they related? Or was something else entirely going on? I had to know. (I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to wild plants.)

Back home, I trawled through my reference books and the internet. And here’s what I discovered.

Mare's-tail and Horsetail

The two plants are completely unrelated, even though their appearance and their common names are similar. Even more confusingly, they have similar scientific names.

Mare's-tail
The water plant (the one with its feet in the canal) is indeed Mare’s-tail, as I thought. Its scientific name is Hippuris vulgaris, from the Greek ‘hippos’, meaning horse. In spite of its appearance, it’s a normal flowering plant, its tiny blooms appearing in June and July.

Mare's-tail, a flowering water plant

Horsetail
The land plant (the one on the bank) however is something extraordinary. It’s Horsetail, scientific name Equisetum from the Latin for horse-hair, and like Ferns it’s one of the oldest plants in existence with its origins 300 million years ago – way before the dinosaurs (who were around 230-65 mya).

    Once it was much much bigger and great forests of tree-like Horsetails covered the land. Scientists know this from fossils, and most coal is the fossilised remains of Ferns and Horsetails.
    The names, both common and scientific, of both plants (Mare's-tail and Horsetail) relate to the way their leaves grow which reminds those in the know of the way horse-hair grows.

    And even though Horsetails don't grow in water, they do like boggy ground - something else to add to the confusion.

Horsetail, an ancient damp-loving land plant

Horsetails don’t have flowers, since flowering plants weren't yet invented that long ago. Instead they reproduce by spores, like fungi (and Ferns).

And now, from pictures I encountered while researching, I had the answer to another mystery – these extraordinary things which Frog and I encountered in a boggy field near the sea in March (a few days before lockdown). We’d never seen anything like them before and we wondered if they’d dropped from outer space like triffids.

What are these weird things that Frog and I saw in mid-March?

They - it turned out - were the spore-bearing cones of this extraordinary plant called Horsetail. These cones appear in spring, before the main stems and leaves which were what I'd seen on the canal bank.

Now I find all that absolutely fascinating and I hope you do too. And I wish I could find a picture of a primeval Horsetail forest to show you, but not even Google can produce one. We'll just have to use our imaginations.

Here instead - and just to remind you yet again which plant is which as I know it's confusing and it took me a long time to get things straight in my mind - is a picture I took yesterday of some Horsetail (the ancient non-flowering land plant) in a field near the house. Yes, it's everywhere, now I look.

Ancient Horsetail, still here after 300 million years

NB1 Horsetails are poisonous to horses, considered Pest Plants in New Zealand, and sometimes invasive in UK gardens - so not everyone loves them.

NB2  Even more confusingly, there's a plant called Horsetail Restio which is no relation (or at least not closely related - if I find out more, I'll let you know). Its scientific name is Elegia capensis and it's much younger (dating to only 145-100 mya) than the Horsetails I'm talking about above. They have it at the Eden Project in Cornwall.