27/6/2020 It has been a rough year for the garden. There was hail, there was a cold snap, but mostly there were deer. The garden is now overrun by equisetum, the only thing the deer won't eat and the sky cannot crush.
Equisetum are strange and ancient plants. They collect silicon from the soil and make little glass strands. Pulling them out of the garden, you can feel the grass breaking inside the stem. It feels like snapping tiny glow sticks. We know dinosaurs ate them, because we've found scratches on hadrosaur teeth from the glass bits. Hadrosaurs grew new teeth in “dental batteries” to deal with eating the equisetum glass. Not much eats them today.
They're older than seeds. They have spores instead. Each spore has ribbony bits curled around it. When the spores get wet, the ribbons fill with water and uncurl and straighten like the party horns that go FWEEE and uncurl when you blow into them. The FWEEE pushes the spores up into the air. If they land somewhere dry, the water evaporates and ribbons curl up again, until the next time it rains. FWEEE. They dance all around the yard and get into everything. They like disturbed ground and in between places, where the other plants have been removed: railroads, roadsides, graveyards, deer-eaten gardens.
They are three hundred million years old. Older than dinosaurs. Older than trees. Older than the continents and seas. Hadrosaurs grew hundreds of teeth to eat them, and it still wasn't enough.
They will outlast us, and dance on our graves. FWEEE.
