In February or March 2008, I was given an opportunity for extra credit in my Plant Systematics class: produce something creative (artwork, poetry, etc.) that relates to botany. It just so happened that the course material itself had already provided me with the perfect inspiration. We had just been studying the horsetails and scouring rushes (family Equisetaceae), and had learned that the fifteen living species in the genus
Equisetum are the only surviving representatives of the horsetails’ entire class. (To put that in perspective, that would be like something like having fifteen species of mice being the only mammals on Earth.) This information so amazed me that I began thinking about what it would be like from the Equisetum’s perspective, being the last survivors of a formerly diverse and prominent group, now limited to growing in the shadows of trees and brightly colored flowers, and saddled with a name likening them to the posterior appendages of equines. And so I composed “The
Equisetum’s Lament”, a poem told from the point of view of these plants, as they reflect on their ancestral grandeur and their present humble and overlooked status. The poem was very popular with my class, my professor, and my family, and of all the poems I’ve ever written, it’s almost certainly the one I’m most proud of. For some time I’ve been planning on sharing it here, and have finally gotten around to it. Some of the words I use are probably difficult to pronounce, and many are probably rather obscure to readers not acquainted with plant anatomy and classification. If you can’t say “Equisetaceae”, I direct you to the list of terms and scientific references I have provided below the poem.
I hope you enjoy the poem. Please tell me what you think.
The Equisetum’s Lament
These days we stand small and meek
growing by a shaded creek
Humans see our bankside clumps
and refer to us as horses’ rumps
If they’d only seen us in our day
they might have something else to say
Before flowers, grass, broad-leaves and fruit
Before the first angiosperm took root
Back in the Carboniferous time
we arthrophytes were in our prime
Some of us stood one hundred feet
We ruled the swamps of coal and peat
The insects first learned how to fly
beneath our towering strobili
And we saw the humans first crawl out
looking not so much like apes as trout
But to humans today, we’re a thing to dismiss
Pity that it’s come to this
Such a great and regal lot
now reduced to scrubbing pots
It seems our glory days are done
Once many genera, now just one
Our reign is over, yet here we stay
So remember the Equisetaceae
You need to have some knowledge of botany and paleontology in order to fully appreciate this poem. For the benefit of readers who have less familiarity with those subjects, here is a guide to all the scientific terms and allusions I use (including pronunciation):
ï
Equisetum (Eh-kwih-see-tum): is the only living genus in the family Equisetaceae (Eh-kwih-seh-tay-see-ay), class Equisetopsida. The fifteen species in this genus are the only surviving members of a group 375 million years old.
ï Most modern horsetails are between 8 inches and 5 feet (0.2–1.5 meters) tall (though some species are larger) and grow in wet, sandy, and/or clayey soils, often around water.
ï Members of the genus
Equisetum are commonly called horsetails, as some species resemble the tail of a horse.
Equisetum translates in Latin to “horse bristle”.
ï Horsetails predate many of the plants and plant characteristics that are familiar to us today, including flowering and fruiting plants, modern broad-leaved trees, and the grasses.
ï Angiosperm (an-jee-oh-spurm): a plant in the division Magnoliophyta, the flowering plants. These evolved in the Mesozoic era, long after the horsetails appeared.
ï Carboniferous (Kar-buh-nif-er-us): the geologic time period lasting from approximately 354 to 290 million years ago, during which the Equisetaceae were at the peak of their diversity and abundance. The name is Latin for “coal bearing”, and refers to the abundant peat bogs of the time, which fossilized into vast coal deposits.
ï Arthrophytes (ar-thro-fytes): in the past, horsetails have been given their own division (equivalent to a phylum in animal classification), alternately titled Arthrophyta, Equisetophyta, or Sphenophyta. More recently, it has been suggested that they are actually in the same division as ferns (Pteridophyta). I was unaware of this at the time I composed the poem in 2008, and my Plant Systematics textbook (which may have been slightly out-of-date) grouped the horsetails under Arthrophyta, hence my use of the division name here.
ï
Calamites (Kal-a-myte-eez) was a genus of tree-like horsetail from the Carboniferous. Fossils of trunks over 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter are known, and they are estimated to have grown 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 meters) tall.
ï Strobili (stro-bih-lye): the spore-bearing structures at the ends of horsetail stems. In some species, the main stem is topped with a single strobilus.
ï Horsetails evolved in the Devonian period, at around the time the first tetrapods (four-legged backboned animalsóa group which includes humans) arose from lobe-finned fish. Likewise, the oldest known flying insects date from the Carboniferous.
ï The abrasive stems of some horsetail species have been used in the past for scrubbing pots, pans, and other metal utensils, hence their alternative name, scouring rush.
ï Genera (jen-er-a): plural of genus (jee-nus), a unit of biological classification above family and below species (Example: the species
Tyrannosaurus rex is in the genus
Tyrannosaurus).
ï Equisetaceae (eh-kwih-seh-tay-see-ay): as mentioned above, the horsetail family, limited today to fifteen species in one genus.
The photo (click for a larger image) is of a woodland horsetail (
Equisetum sylvaticum) I picked in the woods outside our house this Tuesday (to show a visiting relative what a horsetail looked like while sharing the poem). The stem was almost completely straight when I plucked it, but it started to wilt almost immediately, giving the plant a melancholy appearance which I felt suited the poem perfectly. (As an aside, horsetails sprout from horizontal underground stems called rhizomes, so in picking one I was not hurting the would plant any more than you would damage the grass on your lawn by mowing it, for those of you who might be concerned that I killed a horsetail for the sake of a visual aid.
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