There is a strip (about a quarter of mile long and 20 yards wide) of land along the edge of a field near our house where these beasties come up every year in vast numbers. They start to appear in late April and reach about 3 foot high by mid summer before dying away again. Currently about 18 inches tall. They don't change in form as they mature, just get taller. Not sure I've seen them anywhere else, certainly not locally.
This is less than half a mile from the house John Wyndham lived when he wrote Day of the Triffids so I'm obviously thinking the worst!
Jamaican Woodbine (Ganjanium Marleii)
Looks like a horsetail species, although I like PP’s answer.
Jamaican Woodbine (Ganjanium Marleii)
Rubbish. It's some kind of not-weed.
Horsetail- thanks.
Life would be soooo much more fun if PP was correct.
Like would be soooo much more fun if PP was correct.
As far as I am concerened..... I always am and it always is.
Equisetum, Horsetails, proper Jurassic park species, tricky to ID more specifically.
Horsetails, very primitive, dinosaurs probably munched them, and very hard indeed to get rid of
Horse tail/mare's tail. Same thing. One of the oldest plants on this planet. Almost impossible to eradicate. Normal weedkiller just bounces off them. They can be got rid off but you need to be really determined.
Yup horsetail.
As others have said, very difficult to kill, partly because of the enormous tap root it has. I had some, mixed with Japanese Knot weed, and ended up killing it by cutting the stem just below a node and injecting Roundup straight into the vacuous space! A bit drastic.
Marestail yeah. My allotment is riddled with it. I've ended up putting weed membrane down and it's still managed to poke through that in a lot of places.
Amazingly tenacious stuff.
Only way I managed to get rid was to turf over it, doesn't cope with competition and mowing.
It'll quite happily push through tarmac!
Hello,
Bruce's other half here. I am a botanist.
What you have is Great Horsetail (Equisetum telmateia) . It is a very nice plant and definitely one to be pleased about. It is related to Field Horsetail which is Equisetum arvense.
Field Horsetail is sometimes refered to as Mare's Tail and it can be quite a troublesome garden / allotment weed.
Plant names can be quite confusing because although people often call Field Horsetail Mare's Tail, Mare's Tail is a different (and rather lovely) aquatic plant called Hippuris vulgaris.
Either way, your plant is a good 'un and is nice to see. It usually grows in damp ground and my guess is that the side of the field is a ditch or has regular water run-off.
Enjoy your Horsetail 🙂
Thanks Bruce's wife - all great information. It's an odd area which has clearly been 'sculptured' and banked up in the last couple of decades but there is indeed water nearby - a stream about 20m away but about 5m below. But the soil is mostly chalk.
When I walk past it this weekend it will be good to know what I'm looking at but slightly sad it isn't triffids!
Amazingly tenacious stuff.
Well, any living entity that manages to outlive the dinosaurs pretty much unchanged has to be.
It’s a lot smaller now, though, than it was during the Triassic, or whenever it was at its height as a significant plant/tree.
