Like eating glass

Equisetum telmateia (Equisetopsida) at Cambrid...
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You may be familiar with the plant genus Equisetum, more commonly known as horsetail or scouring rush. Scouring rush is a practical name based on where Equisetum is found and what it’s good for. Rushes generally grow in water and Equisetum, while not exactly a type of rush, certainly won’t be found far from a stream. And this plant was used for scrubbing pots before the invention of that rough green stuff on all the sponges you buy now. It’s so effective at pot-scrubbing because its cell walls contain silica.

This study tries to explain how the heck silica gets from hanging out in dirt to being a component of cell walls. It’s not that simple. Remember when you were a kid and ate dirt? You didn’t suddenly develop skin like sandpaper. Conclusion: Equisetum is cooler than kids.

Some people say you should make tea with it for hypothyroidism or try eating it if it’s a problem in your garden. I would really only suggest ingesting it if you feel that hypothyroidism or weeds in your garden make life not worth living as it’s toxic enough to kill a cow through disruption of thiamine metabolism.

Comments

  1. […] Equisetum aren’t the only organisms that use silica in their cell walls. Algae in the phylum Chrysophyta (golden-brown algae) use it to make “seeds.” Golden-brown algae are often found in ponds and shallow lakes that freeze from top to bottom in the winter. How is the poor little alga going to eat or swim around in a block of ice? It cannot! This could lead to a huge tragedy involving many many dead algae. But golden-brown algae just pack up all the important parts into an itsy bitsy glass box (called a statospore), snuggle up in the muddy pond bottom, and wait until the ice melts. […]

  2. […] Mosses had their share of existence in the blogosphere these weeks. Some species do make a winter cold meiosis. But you still need some light to have them grow, as is explained at Moss Plants And More, and when it has everything needed (like in a tropical green paradise), it will readily grow on leaves. But let’s not forget about other wonder plants like ferns or horsetails… You may not be obcessed about fern gametophytes, but here it is made sexy, and with cool pictures (part 1, part 2). Going our way, it strikes me as a recent scientific litterature habit to oppose in natura and in silico. At Gravity’s Rainbow, you’ll fuse both and learn about some natural silica from horsetails. […]

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