Prehistoric survivor growing in Syke herb garden has roots stretching back 300 million years

Residents picking herbs from a community garden in Syke are being invited to help tackle horsetail — a persistent weed whose ancestors grew locally more than 300 million years ago.

By Rochdale Daily 8 Aug 2026 · 16:45 UTC

Rochdale Daily headline card: Prehistoric survivor growing in Syke herb garden has roots stretching back 300 million years — Image: Rochdale Daily

A troublesome weed growing in a community herb garden in Syke has a remarkable connection to the landscape's prehistoric past — with its ancestors dating back more than 300 million years.

Residents are being encouraged to help maintain the community herb garden while collecting fresh herbs to take home.

The garden is open for people to pick herbs for their own use, but volunteers are asking visitors who have a few spare minutes to lend a hand with some weeding at the same time.

One plant in particular is proving difficult to control: horsetail, also commonly known as mare's tail.

While modern gardeners may regard it as a persistent nuisance, horsetail belongs to an extraordinarily ancient group of plants whose history stretches back to long before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

During the Carboniferous period, more than 300 million years ago, relatives of today's horsetails grew across the landscapes that would eventually become northern England.

Among them were Calamites — tree-like plants related to modern horsetails which could grow many metres tall and formed part of the vast Carboniferous vegetation.

Evidence of that lost landscape can still be found locally. A fossil discovered in a quarry at Tonacliffe shows the distinctive remains of Calamites, providing a physical connection between the plants growing here hundreds of millions of years ago and the much smaller horsetails residents battle in gardens today.

Carboniferous plant fossils can also be found within rocks across the surrounding moorland, reflecting a period when the area's environment looked dramatically different from the Pennine landscape residents know today.

People remain welcome to collect herbs from the community garden, but anyone visiting is being encouraged to pull a few weeds while they are there.

As the volunteers joked, nobody wants today's horsetail growing to the size of its Carboniferous grandparents.

The community garden is maintained for local people to enjoy, and even a few minutes of weeding can help keep it productive and accessible for everyone.