Alien plant
Sometimes, when walking in the forest, I see a plant that looks out of place in The Netherlands, or indeed anywhere. It just doesn't fit in with the rest:
Olympus Stylus 1s, 42mm, ISO200, f5.6, 1/160s
It is a fertile stem of a plant called field horsetail (Equisetum arvense). It could just be my imagination, but the little flowers look like miniature dentures to me:
Olympus XZ-1, 28mm, ISO100, f5.6, 1/160s
Expanding on @nin0000's comment and stealing from Wikipedia; it's also an ancient plant:
"Equisetum is a "living fossil" as it is the only living genus of the entire class Equisetopsida, which for over one hundred million years was much more diverse and dominated the understory of late Paleozoic forests. Some Equisetopsida were large trees reaching to 30 meters tall. The genus Calamites of the family Calamitaceae, for example, is abundant in coal deposits from the Carboniferous period."
All in all, a really strange plant, very interesting, but a pain to get rid of when it has invaded your garden.
That's Amazing
A living fossil Ocrdu, they speak to my imagination.
They are a very old genus, yes. I worked your comment into the text. Thanks!
Those two are cruising close to the NSFW section! Ha ha!
Do you have a lot of them there? (Besides the garden...which they must have invaded.) Native here, and very interesting plant, as you say. Unless I'm mistaken, they are partially comprised of silica.
Not a lot, but you see groups of them on forest edges. None in my garden. They are so hard to get rid of, that land infested with them got a tax reduction in previous centuries; in old documents here, such land was referred to as heremoesig land, "heremoes" being the Dutch name for the plant.
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Very cool looking and something I have never seen before, thanks for broadening my horizons!
Wonderful nature...
Never saw these plants
Really amazing plant! I haven't ever seen it before!
Never seen this strange plant before... nice