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Portrait of Field horsetail

Nature · Ferns, grasses & other plants

Field horsetail

Native · shoots to about 60 cm · arable land, verges, banks and gardens

Equisetum arvense — Equisetaceae

Field horsetail, sometimes called common horsetail, is the persistent garden and arable weed whose deep rhizomes defeat fork and spade alike. It has two kinds of shoot: pale, pinkish, toadstool-like cone-bearing stems in early spring, and green, whorled, bottle-brush stems later on. The RHS describes it as belonging to a group of plants that predate the dinosaurs, and it is a living fossil among British plants.

How to spot them

  • ▸Early spring: pinkish-brown, unbranched shoots, each topped with a blunt cone, like small toadstools
  • ▸Later: separate green shoots with whorls of slender, simple, spreading branches, like a bottle-brush, to about 60 cm
  • ▸Sheath teeth spread out from the stem rather than pressing against it
  • ▸Rhizomes running metres deep, which is why it re-appears after digging
  • ▸Look-alike: marsh horsetail has appressed teeth, wetter habitat and cones on green shoots; great horsetail is much larger and ivory-white

How to know it

Its pale, pink-brown, toadstool-like spring shoots carry the cones, and die before the green shoots appear

Field horsetail.

Rhizomes that go down 2 m defeat gardeners; a fragment as small as a thumbnail can regrow

Field horsetail — the RHS gives rhizomes as deep as 2 m.

Belongs to a group of plants that predate the dinosaurs and is the commonest horsetail of arable land and verges

Field horsetail — a Carboniferous lineage.

Stems are gritty with silica, and were once used to scour pots and polish pewter

Field horsetail — often called 'pewterwort' and 'scouring rush' for horsetails in general.

The genus name is Latin for 'horse bristle', and this one is named for the ploughed land where it thrives

Field horsetail — arvense means 'of the field'.

Spore clusters are borne in cones on a stem with no green colour, quite unlike the sterile summer shoots

Field horsetail.

Quick-fire facts

  • •Native perennial with spore cones in early spring, then green sterile stems of about 60 cm, according to the RHS
  • •Rhizomes can grow up to 2 m deep and small fragments regenerate, so digging tends to spread it
  • •Eradicating an established colony can take many years; the RHS suggests repeated pulling, forking and shading
  • •Equisetum arvense is the Latin binomial: arvense means 'of cultivated fields'
  • •Horsetails are the last survivors of a class that included tree-sized calamites in the Carboniferous coal forests
  • •Not a flowering plant: reproduces by spores; the spore-bearing cone releases spores with tiny coiled elaters
  • •Can poison horses when it is present in hay through thiamine (vitamin B1) destruction, though it is far less dangerous than marsh horsetail
  • •Stems contain silica, giving the abrasive texture used for scouring

Drill it — 6 cards

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Sources