Horsetail Plant (Equisetum) , BC, Canada
I am one of those people that think weeds are quite beautiful.
Take this one. The pronounceable name is Horsetail Plant. The one I can't wrap my tongue around is Equisetum. Either way you try and pronounce it, at this time of the year they are amazing.
When I started looking into why this plant seems to have a bad name in the plant world, I found out that is has been used for medicinal purposes for hundreds of years. Treating everything from
kidney problems to tuberculosis. Wow. So what did people from the past know that we don't?
Apparently the stems have a high silica content -- and that is a good thing since silica obsorbs heavy metal from soil content. So let's start putting all this into context.
We have been pretty nasty to Mother Earth over the last few hundred years, dumping all kinds of weird, wild and not so wonderful junk in, on and under her surface. Humans never seem to learn.
And here sits this plant that we kind of sneer at, we call it a "weed" and that label then gives us the right to go out and try to eradicate it from the face of the earth. But all it's doing is quietly adapting and growing and .... flourishing ... doing what it has always done. Trying to save us from ourselves by keeping our soil clean.
I, for one, am humbled by the mere Horsetail Plant.
5 comments:
as humans we think that they are the masters of the world, unfortunately the earth is not considered to be a living being which she is our mother.
u may like this poem i had written
http://fractalenlightenment.blogspot.com/2006/08/poetry-mother-nature-is-dying.html
Interesting that the word Equisetum is similar to Equine - guess that's why the English name mentions 'horse'.
Wow. Beautiful post. Thank you for educating us on the horsetail plant, and in the process, making it so much more than a "weed"!
Thanks also for visiting my blogs, and for the terrific review on the boyfriend blog! I'll be checking back in on ya! :)
I love this plant. It's great for th hair & skin.
Yup, equisetum or horsetail or whatever you want to call it is an amazing plant. But be careful about ingesting it. Too much silica is not necessarily good for you. Still it does have some good medicinal qualities. It is actually used as an aid to prevent bedwetting. It just goes to show there is good and bad about everything. It is how you use it that is important. Thanks for a great post!
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