Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
It commonly grows in dense colonies along freshwater shorelines or in shallow water in ponds, swamps, ditches, and other sluggish or still waters with mud bottoms. [4] This horsetail is sometimes seen as an invasive species because it is very hardy and tends to overwhelm other garden plants unless it is contained. When planting, it is best to ...
Calamites is a genus of extinct arborescent (tree-like) horsetails to which the modern horsetails (genus Equisetum) are closely related. [1] Unlike their herbaceous modern cousins, these plants were medium-sized trees, growing to heights of 30–50 meters (100–160 feet). [2]
It is an evergreen herbaceous perennial plant, with green stems, each stem usually topped by a spore-bearing strobilus.The stems, produced in late spring and dying down a year and a half or two years later, are 18–150 cm (7.1–59.1 in) (occasionally to 220 cm (87 in)) tall and 6–18 mm (0.24–0.71 in) diameter, usually unbranched; they are ridged, with 14–50 ridges, and bear whorls of ...
Equisetum (/ ˌ ɛ k w ɪ ˈ s iː t əm /; horsetail) is the only living genus in Equisetaceae, a family of vascular plants that reproduce by spores rather than seeds. [2]Equisetum is a "living fossil", the only living genus of the entire subclass Equisetidae, which for over 100 million years was much more diverse and dominated the understorey of late Paleozoic forests.
The plants have intercalary meristems in each segment of the stem and rhizome that grow as the plant gets taller. This contrasts with most seed plants, which grow from an apical meristem - i.e. new growth comes only from growing tips (and widening of stems). Horsetails bear cones (technically strobili, sing. strobilus) at the tips of some stems.
The plant is well identifiable from the 3-6 reddish brown leaf sheaths or "teeth". [1] [3] The fertile stems are shorter than the others; on these develop the cones that bear the spore casings or strobili. [1] The leaves develop on the fertile stems and the stems lengthen; then the cones open to release their spores. The cones then drop off.
Equisetaceae is the only surviving family of the Equisetales, a group with many fossils of large tree-like plants that possessed ribbed stems similar to modern horsetails. Pseudobornia is the oldest known relative of Equisetum ; it grew in the late Devonian , about 375 million years ago and is assigned to its own order.
Equisetum arvense, the field horsetail or common horsetail, is an herbaceous perennial plant in the Equisetidae (horsetails) sub-class, native throughout the arctic and temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. It has separate sterile non-reproductive and fertile spore-bearing stems growing from a perennial underground rhizomatous stem system.