Horsetails

Hello Friends,

Pepper and I have been on a road trip the past week and a half. We drove up the west coast mostly on highway 101 and a few smaller highways, ending in Seattle where we met Betsy. She flew up so as to spend some time with family and friends there. The three of us are in Portland, Oregon now, from which we'll head home over the next week on an inland route.

One nice feature along the sides of roads and almost anywhere else you look is horsetails, scientific name Equisetum. They're extremely invasive and quite beautiful. In the USA I've seen them mostly in Oregon and Washington, but I read the northern east coast for many years has had issues dealing with their spread. Per Wikipedia:

"Equisetum is a 'living fossil', the only living genus of the entire subclass Equisetidae, which for over 100 million years was much more diverse and dominated the understorey of late Paleozoic forests. Some equisetids were large trees reaching to 30 m (98 ft) tall. The genus Calamites of the family Calamitaceae, for example, is abundant in coal deposits from the Carboniferous period. The pattern of spacing of nodes in horsetails, wherein those toward the apex of the shoot are increasingly close together, is said to have inspired John Napier to invent logarithms. Modern horsetails first appeared during the Jurassic period.

The genus Equisetum as a whole, while concentrated in the non-tropical northern hemisphere, is near-cosmopolitan, being absent only from Antarctica, though they are not known to be native to Australia, New Zealand nor the islands of the Pacific. They are most common in northern North America (Canada and the northernmost United States), where the genus is represented by nine species."

I took the right and left eye shots by surrounding my subject with metal frame sides, 12" wide by 14" high, still in occasional use from my early phantogram days (Phantograms from Nature includes a horsetail image). My camera was a Google Pixel 6 Pro cellphone, cha-cha style (shoot the left eye shot, slide over a bit, shoot the right eye shot).

Regards,

Barry Rothstein

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