Something New in the Old Horsetail Patch

I think I may be one of the few people I know who actually loves Scouring Rush (Equisetum hyemale ssp. affine), also known as Rough Horsetail. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by how you could pull the skinny ridged stalks apart at the hollow joints and plug them back together again, sort of like Pop Beads (if you're old enough to remember those!).   As a Girl Scout, while primitive camping, I learned how effective a wadded up handful of their silica-gritty stalks could be at scouring clean the smoke-blackened pots we'd cooked our food in over an open wood fire.  And more recently, as an amateur naturalist, I have learned how widespread this interesting plant is, native to temperate northern regions of our entire planet, Asia, Europe, and North America included.  And how truly ancient a plant it is, too: derived from much larger, tree-like plants that thrived over 400 million years ago during the Devonian Period of Earth's history. So yes, an extremely interesting plant, and also (to my mind) a beautiful one, with its braceleted evergreen stalks, ornately complex spore organs, and a strictly vertical habit of growth that makes me think of organ pipes or the strings of a harp that could be strummed to produce lovely sounds. (And there actually is an association between this species and music: the gritty plants have been used traditionally to hone and smooth the reeds used in woodwind instruments.)

But OK, I know that not everyone loves it.  Especially landscapers who want to grow something else in the seasonally damp-soiled habitat Scouring Rush prefers to dominate (which it certainly tends to do).  The landscapers even dare to call this ancient native plant "invasive."  Hah!  Don't they know this plant was here first, long before they came along with their flowers and other wussy stuff.  I often have to bite my tongue lest I tell them that it's their plants that would be the invaders of the equisetum's habitat.

But lately, I've noticed that another plant has invaded the Scouring Rush patches.  But at least it's another horsetail. At first, I thought these much skinnier plants might be just baby Scouring Rushes.  But babies don't display mature sex organs.  That's what the small black-and-white turnip-shaped tops are, atop these really slender ridged and jointed green stalks. The botanical term for this structure is "strobilus," and it means the organ where spores are produced and released.

I now know that these very slender plants are a species in their own right, called Variegated Horsetail (Equisetum variegatum).  The first time I saw them, two years ago, they were mixed in with a long-established patch of Scouring Rush.  Lately, I have found E. variegatum in monocultural patches exclusively their own. It is interesting that when I looked up this horsetail species on the New York Flora Association's Plant Atlas, I learned that the species "is clearly spreading into areas it had previously not been known from. This species is circumpolar in distribution and perhaps these 'new' populations are the result of an Eurasian introduction, but no data is currently available to support this hypothesis."

So I guess it's no wonder I had not seen E. variegatum until recently.  And I will love it just as much as I've loved its much bigger cousin, E. hyemale ssp. affine.  Here is a closer look at the two species, showing the difference in both their size and appearance. I find both species truly beautiful.