Growing up to 30 cm in early spring, field horsetail’s pallid, distinctly jointed, cone-headed stem appears akin to an elongated mushroom. Indeed, it lacks chlorophyll and releases hundreds of thousands of pale, green spores within days of appearing. Yet it is one of the world’s most widespread and adaptable plants, inhabiting low-lying forests, fields, watersides, wetlands, and high arctic tundra across the northern hemisphere.
As the succulent fertile stems shrivel after shedding their spores, they’re quickly replaced by far more numerous green, non-reproductive horsetail stems rising separately from the soil. While they look like miniature Christmas trees—with circular whorls of needle-like branches sprouting around each joint of their hollow stems—they perish with autumn frosts.
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Horsetail feels rough to the touch because its stems and branches are frosted with silica—minute particles of quartz. Thanks to silicic acid from the soil incorporated into their cell walls, horsetails have the highest silicon concentrations of all vascular plants, imbuing them with strength, rigidity, and defence against fungal infections, toxins, and water loss. The abrasive stems were long used to scrub pots and polish wood.Â
The plant’s roots, which can account for about 85 per cent of its biomass, can spread up to 100 metres, sending up a large colony of stems. Its network of thin, branching horizontal rhizomes, festooned with many small, round tubers, runs in multiple levels down to two or more metres underground. This subterranean infrastructure is incredibly resilient to soil disturbance, drought, the hottest forest fires, and even volcanic eruptions.Surviving cataclysms and climate change has given horsetails a 400-million-year run. The world’s 15 or so species are living fossils, the diminutive survivors of a vast array of giant whorl-leaved trees in Carboniferous swamp forests.
This article was originally published in the March/April 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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