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Herb Post: Horsetails

plants and movement, feet and tails

Herb Post: Horsetails

Riddle me this: how can I write an herb post that fits in with the theme of moment/momentum?

When people talk about plant toxins, it's become somewhat a cliche to say "a plant can't run away from you, so it poisons you instead." Not much movement there, is the implication.

And riddle me this: when you think of silica, one of the first associations you might have is glass, which is about as brittle as it gets, but the mineral silica is essential to healthy skin, hair, and joints, all about flexibility.

Let's talk about horsetail.

Let's talk first about how it's not really true that plants don't move, even if they can't run away from you.

Here's plantain, which grows absolutely everywhere. I already brought this plant up in an earlier post. plantago

Its name is as unrelated to the big-banana plantain as are the two plants to each other. The big banana's name is from Spanish platano, going back to the word for "broad." Little green plantain draws its etymology from "the soles of the feet." This little plant doesn't have its own feet, but it borrows feet. It's traveled all over the world, little sticky seeds (a lot like psyllium seeds) on the soles of the feet of pioneers.

 

Horsetail's another plant that travels. It is overwhelmingly prevalent in Alaska, takes over everything, can make it challenging to grow anything else. But I learned to my amazement that there are areas this far south and hot where horsetail grows too. I know it grew in ancient Greek and Roman times in the Mediterranean because they write about it. But it's far older than that. It's a real dinosaur of a plant--300 million years old. Ancient and versatile. I've known it as a medium-height grassy plant, maybe 12 to 18 inches tall. But I've seen pictures of a South American variety that's over six feet tall!

horsetail sporophyte-200

Like ferns, another extremely ancient order of plants, it doesn't rely solely on photosynthesis. In Alaska you know the ground is thawing when you see this sporophyte (yes, sporo- as in mushroom spore and -phyte as in plant) pop up. That's the first sign of the horsetail, before anything else crowns the birth canal of soil. It's pretty ugly and often has little or no green pigment to it. Each one can spray out thousands of spores--for more and more horsetail plants.

  You'd think things would get crowded if nothing moved and spores kept coming out. Very well, horsetail has another way of propagating. It spreads by underground runners. (They say plants can't run away...then why do so many of them have runners?) These runners can screw themselves down as much as 20 feet deep into the earth! I haven't dug down 20 feet, but I've dug at least three or four, pulling out the black skeins of runners, and not exhausted their supply. What chance does broccoli have against such vigor?

But the really big deal is that these runners run laterally as well as downward. At the time in AK, I read somewhere that they can spread 30 square feet per year. So, we had a large area we wanted to convert to garden, and we covered it with black tarps before winter and well into early spring, hoping to suffocate out the horsetail in the off season. But between the underground runners and those anemic-looking sporophytes, it's clear that horsetail doesn't need either air or light to continue reproducing. Sure enough, at the very best interpretation we had slightly less horsetail in that area. Still plenty, and more horsetail just outside of the tarped area to compensate.

AKhorsetails-200

 Back to silica. Horsetail is like a living avatar of that mineral. It feels a bit like glass splinters. It's brittle--if you're trying to weed it out, you'll inevitably break it off at one of its many nodes, and any tiny stray piece will borrow your feet, walk somewhere else, and grow and thrive there.

In recent years, the silica content has become much touted, and it's often added to skin/joint care teas and formulas. Isn't it fascinating that collagen, which is responsible for our flexibility, relies so much upon silica?

That said, there are skeptics of the benefits of horsetail in this context, and it isn't a use supported by tradition. For myself, when I lived in Alaska and was surrounded by horsetail, I was also surrounded by nettles, and it was the nettles I felt drawn to for food and medicine. I tended to use the horsetail for scrubbing dishes, another traditional use.

The traditional use of horsetail for medicine is as a diuretic (it seems many silica-rich herbs have diuretic properties also). And from a homeopathic perspective, this makes a lot of sense. The burning-needles sensation of a urinary tract infection can be referred to the needley feeling of the horsetail. Like heals like.

A couple more fun facts, since clearly this dinosaur plant is potent medicine. It's bad medicine for horses, despite the fact that the Greeks (hippouris) and Romans (equisetum) thought it looked like horses' tails. Our neighbor in Alaska said her horses would high-grade horsetail, eating as much of it as they could get to. Horsetail makes horses vitamin-B-deficient, which can be fatal, so our neighbor had to give her horses supplemental vitamin B so they wouldn't die.

Finally, it's a gold accumulator! Four-and-a-half ounces of gold per ton of plant material makes it the most goldthirsty of any plant measured. 

eagagerg

About the Author

Ela Harrison

Ela is a wordsmith and herb lover who has lived in many places and currently resides in Tucson, AZ.

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