If someone can tell me what the weed in the following URL is, I would be very appreciative:
Thanks in advance. Jason
Looks like horsetail I've seen growing before, but I'm more used to the fruiting body I guess the joints and the little top that looks like the tops on those fancy pepper mills (minus the handles) .. but I've seen stuff like this growing around with it. Hopefully I'm wrong. But what's that *other* stuff growing with it? Is that vinca? or the other potential nasty honeysuckle vine just coming up (green vine link stuff in 128_2866.jpg, looks different than the vinca. Looks like the stuff that turned woody and evil.. weedy honeysuckle. I see english ivy out there, and what's the red stuff? pachysandra.. I ask that as I've never had it or seen it "live"..I've seen enough english ivy do "bad stuff" I'd never willingly have the stuff on the place. To me it's a weed from hell.
Hope I'm wrong about that horsetail stuff though!
Janice
That's a pretty plant, are you thinking of selling seed?
Eve
Have you forgotten your basic botany, Eve?
Being that horsetails are fern allies and not seed bearing plants it would be impossible to get seeds from them.
Waiting for them to flower would especially be futile because they are not even close to being flowering plants.
So sorry, you have horsetails. You can try stomping on it and applying Roundup to the stomped plants. (The bruised plants will absorb what would otherwise roll off the intact plants.)
There supposed to be pre-emergent chemical controls and controls that will suppress the top-growth of horsetails, but you would have to have a license to use any of them.
Pull, pull, and pull some more...forever (or nearly so)...
Horsetails do however bare fruits, & to the untrained eye a one or two inch onion-shaped fruit held well above the rest of the plant looks like a seed pod or weird flower.
-paghat the ratgirl
No, horsetails do not bear fruit either. Only flowering plant produce fruit.
Arthrophytes produce terminal strobili that may superficially look like miniature pine cones but their structure is very different and they produce spores not seeds.
Don't be so damned ridiculous. The spores and sporeheads of mosses and horsetails are their FRUITS, as any reasonable dictionary will inform you.
-paggers
Sorry, but the so-called "fruiting bodies" of non-flowering plants are not at all the same as the true fruit of flowering plants. Before a plant can bear true fruit, it must be able to produce seeds. Non-flowering spore bearing plants don't qualify.
The "fruiting bodies" of non-flowering spore bearing plants are properly termed sporangia.
Look it up in a botanical dictionary and brush up on your functional and systematic botany.
The problem with common knowledge is that it is usually wrong.
though a 'fruiting body' can be applied to sporangia etc. The matter does not seem to be worth arguing over as long as we know what is being discussed. Best Wishes Brian.
"Botanically a 'fruit' can only be the mature ovary bearing ripe seeds, though a 'fruiting body' can be applied to sporangia etc.
The matter does not seem to be worth arguing over as long as we know what is being discussed. Best Wishes Brian."
And therein lies the problem, Brian.
If one cannot learn a bit of basic botany in a garden newsgroup, learn the proper names of plant parts and how they function, how can one appreciate their plants and the true marvels of nature they really are?
Does the low down on floral sex make you squeamish?
The bottom line is that you cannot get seeds from a horsetail. The very suggestion is an evolutionary anachronism.
Botanically "fruit" includes (to quote the Botanical Encyclopedia & Dictionary), "The spores of cryptogams and the organs accessory to them," & all unabridged dictionaries agree with the more specialized botanical language. And cryptogams are ferns, mosses, horsetails, & suchlike. You certainly CAN define fruits in such manners that even strawberries aren't fruits in a given sense. But if you see a little sporehead on a moss or horsetail, believe it: it's properly called a fruit.
-paggers
C-v As a matter of genuine interest: what is the Gametophyte of the Horstail?. I should know but don't. Did you notice the confusion on the UK site between Mare's and Horsetails? Best Wishes Brian
I gather your idea of a "botanical dictionary" is a shopper's guide to grocery shopping. But it's comical you'd use the term Fruiting Bodies instead of the more accurate Fruit Bodies, as though scared of using the word Fruit in this correct context while calling it incorrect. I'll give you points, though, for preferring being noisy to being right, it's kind of cute, like a yapping pomeranian.
You may have thought you were just being anal (& flamy) insisting on some specialized definition even in an unspecialized context, but you were just being wrong. Before you tell people to grab their dictionaries, make sure you checked yours first, & not just that grammar school glossary in back of some kid's book about apples.
Here are a few definitions of the English word as used by English speakers including botanists, & there is no need AT ALL to follow the word "fruit" with "bodies" to be 100% accurate:
Fruit: 4) The spores of cryptogams and the organs accessory to them. [Encyclopedia of Plants and Botanical Dictionary]
Fruit: 4) The spores and accessory organs of ferns, mosses, fungi, algae, or lichen [Random House Unabridged Dictionary]
Fruit: 4) (Bot.) The spore cases or conceptacles of flowerless plants, as of ferns, mosses, algae, etc., with the spores contained in them. [Webster Dictionary]
Now if you are still using your JUNIOR dictionary or some short-hand glossary in the back of your shopper's guide to fresh produce, you may lack the complete definitions.
So just try to stop telling people they don't know diddly shit but you do, when in reality you're just as fault-ridden as any among us. Maybe next time I'll be the one who makes an error; this time you made it -- a mite hysterically three times in a row!
-paghat the ratgirl
strawberry etc. true fruits. They have fruits within or on them. Best Wishes Brian.
If plastic sheets will kill grass, why not horsetails?
To a great extent, all the horsetails in your neighborhood, & the next four neighborhoods surrounding yours, are one super-gigantic plant, connected by an enormous ever-widening root system. You could smother it to the ground in one place but the root would still be connecting horsetails elsewhere, & when the sheet is removed, the roots send up more shoots. This is one great reason why horsetails, though semi-aquatic bog plants, can nevertheless pop up in extremely dry places, as they are still connected to wetland SOMEplace even if quite distant.
Horsetails happen to be very attractive, so it's a good idea to try not to hate them. They can be mowed down where not wanted, appreciated wherever they look nice. But nothing short of an extensive neighborhood banding together to commit major toxic injury against the planet will make them go away. They've been here since before the Age of Amphibians, & when our own species has driven everything else in the world to extinction, horsetails will still be here in that coming Age of the Cockroach.
-paghat the ratgirl
Eh? What's that?
You want horsetails to kill grass?
Or do you want them to kill plastic sheets?
Paper covers rock and rock breaks scissors but scissors cuts paper!!!
Sorry, but paghat is most definitely correct. Any good quality botanical dictionary will provide a definition of 'fruit' as being the reproductive product of ANY plant, "including the spores of cryptogams and the organs accessory to them." (Dictionary of Horticulture)
As to the validity of the argument, any exchange is valid if it corrects misinformation.
pam - gardengal
The "Dictionary of Horticulture" is your reference?
Thanks for providing today's chuckle.
That silly thing is rife with errors.
Try instead using a botanical dictionary to answer a botanical question.
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