Having bought a little tree book (as well as a little wild flower book) I am starting to expand my knowledge of UK plants. The first day was spent going from one horse chestnut to the next, but now there are a few more that I have added: e.g. red oak, London plane, silver birch and sycamore.

A plant though, that I recognised along the side of the canal was in neither of these books being neither a tree nor a wild-flower-type plant. When I say recognise, I mean: “That looks really familiar, I wonder if it is a…”

By choosing the family “Equisataceae” and selecting England on the Botanical Society of the British Isles questionaire, I was able to find out which species it was, namely: Equisetum fluviatile

What seems like a very long time ago, I did an MSc in Natural Product Chemistry which dragged out over 2 years, because I kept not being able to isolate anything interesting (and I got sidetracked into doing a lot of practical demonstrations and piano teaching). One of the plants that I tried to isolate something interesting from was one of the horsetail species. I ended up getting some quite cool SEMicrographs with the distribution of silicon in the stem after having a bit of trouble with goopy extracts containing rather a lot of silicic acid.