Wheatgrass
Gnaphalium uliginosum (marsh wheatgrass). Family Asteraceae (Compositae).
It is a humble little weed that few people will pay attention to, so inconspicuous is it. Rising 5-20 cm above the ground, wheatgrass is not decorated with anything. The leaves of wheatgrass are small and narrow, covered, like the whole plant, with white pubescence. The apical inflorescences of topiary wheatgrass are small baskets of small yellow florets. In the middle of the basket they are oviparous, at the edges they are pistillate.
Wheatgrass occupies a variety of habitats. It is common along the banks of water bodies and ditches, in waterlogged and flooded meadows, and in floodplain forests. But no less often wheatgrass is found in fields and vegetable gardens as a weed, in both conditions preferring places with unbroken herbage. Wheatgrass is distributed almost all over the country, but more often grows in forest and forest-steppe zones. As a medicinal raw material of wheatgrass is collected above-ground parts of it during flowering. In wheatgrass found alkaloid gnaphalin, flavonoids, vitamin C, carotene, tannins and fatty substances, essential oil, pigments, resins. Preparations of wheatgrass slow the rhythm of heart contractions, have vasodilating and hypotensive properties, are used in the initial stages of hypertension. It is noted that the pressure is lowered and when taking baths with wheatgrass for the feet. Accelerating blood clotting, preparations of wheatgrass are recommended for bleeding. They are found and antibacterial activity, which is used in the treatment of burns, wounds. Dry extracts of wheatgrass and blueberries help with peptic ulcer and duodenal ulcer.
Folk medicine has a wider range of recommendations. These include treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis, insomnia, nervous diseases, hypertension, tachycardia, diabetes, and cancerous tumors. Used wheatgrass and in veterinary medicine. Grinding the herb with oil and honey, make ointments used in the treatment of burns.
Sphagnum moss plant, description of sphagnum moss, sphagnum moss treatment
Sphagnum moss
Sphagnum moss - Sphagnum. Family Sphagnaceae.
Individual stems of sphagnum mosses are small and weak, but in the mass, in the turf, it is already a crushing force. They spread out in a solid carpet in favorable conditions. The world-famous Vasyuganskoye bog in the West Siberian lowland stretches for many hundreds of kilometers. Accumulating water in huge quantities (20 times their dry mass), they bring death to forests and meadows. But is it that scary? Let's try to figure it out. And before I remind you that sphagnum mosses are not only used as healers, but are also extremely valuable technical raw materials. So everything in nature is expedient and useful in one way or another. Sphagnum mosses are no exception.
Man has been familiar with these "aggressors" since prehistoric times, both on the practical and spiritual side. A mass of legends and superstitions are connected with the marshes, and I will tell you about some of them, but later.
Let's start in order. First of all, what kind of plants are these: exceptional and unique? What do they love and why have they spread so widely? В. Г. The sphagnum rubrum presents like this:
He is a moss, a miracle-working builder,
who made a kingdom out of water.
It has lots of light and is spacious,
There are lush "gardens" everywhere.
In the "gardens" the ruby of the living glows,
"The amber of the marshes" is ripening in the sun.
By "ruby" the author of the poems meant cranberry, and by "amber" he meant cloudberry. And sphagnum, or sphagnosus (as it sounds in Greek), sphagnum moss is named for a reason: it translates as "sponge".
Let's look at the morphology of sphagnum mosses. Their structure is simple but very rational, as in all plants well adapted to their ecological environment. Interestingly, sphagnum mosses have no roots, and they suck up water and mineral salts with their whole body. Sphagnum mosses grow by stretching the upper part of the stem in length, while the lower part dies off at the same time. In this way a tourniquet is formed, sometimes very long, bringing the living and dead parts together. At the top of the sphagnum moss stem is a compact head formed by densely seated twigs - formed and rudimentary. As the stem of sphagnum moss grows, the twigs of the head extend and new twigs emerge from the apex cell.
Different species of sphagnum mosses have from two to five branches in each bundle, and they are attached to the stem along its entire length. Individual plants of sphagnum mosses are clasped together into a turf just due to the detached branches. There are also dangling branches, and all together they help the sphagnum moss plant suck water directly from the substrate, acting as a capillary pump. Sphagnum moss leaves are single-layered; one half of their cells have chlorophyll and the other half are empty. The empty (hyaline) cells have pores and fibers. Through the pores of sphagnum moss, water enters the cell, and the fiber like spirals prevent the cell walls from sticking together when there is no water in them. The spore spreading devices are very interesting. The ripened sporogons of sphagnum moss shoot out like a pneumatic gun (the sporogons here are the gun and the spores are the bullets). The pressure force dispersing mature spores of sphagnum moss reaches 3-5 atm (300-500 kPa). "He's walking through the swamp... Suddenly there was a cracking sound, as if someone was snapping bundles of straw. Looked around - nothing but sphagnum. They are overloaded with ripe boxes. Decides to listen. Freezes for a moment. And right next to it; clap clap clap! The sound comes from the boxes. Clap - and a red-brown cloud of spores flies up above one of them, rises about 10 centimeters above the cushion of moss and melts in the air", - this is how one of the attentive and inquisitive swamp scientists saw this unique phenomenon. Sphagnum mosses reproduce not only by spores, but most of all vegetatively, with the help of lateral branches growing from the main stem at the moment.
Only to the untrained eye do all sphagnum mosses seem to look the same. But how different they are: red, pink, yellow, brown, green; with thick or thin twigs; with crowded or loose heads. In total, there are over 300 species of sphagnum mosses in the world, and 42 species in the USSR. Sphagnum mosses are most abundant in transitional and upland bogs, but they are also present in lowland bogs. Often sphagnum mosses form a continuous carpet in both swampy forests and tundra. Sphagnum mosses are distributed mainly in tundra and forest zones.
Sphagnum mosses are the main peat formers, but not all 42 species. There are edificators (plants that create the ecological environment and then the peat). They are less than half the species. These are sphagnum mosses Baltic, large, brown, Magellanic, papillose, deceptive, narrow-leaved, reddish, etc.
Let us now try to answer the question of why sphagnum mosses have spread so widely. There can only be one answer: climate change. Comparing the time of active dispersal of sphagnum mosses in the Holocene and in other interglacials, we see that it occurred during wet and cool periods, which always followed warm and wet periods. By the time of the most favorable climate for sphagnum mosses, the conditions for their spreading were already ready: grass bogs were developed and peat was sufficient. Once it got cooler, the grasses and trees no longer felt so cozy and their competitive strength waned. This is what the sphagnum mosses needed: conditions are ready, competitors are losing ground. About 4,000 years ago, sphagnum mosses entered the fray with other plants of bogs and forests. Gradually sphagnum mosses conquered their living space and became dominants and edificators. On sphagnum bogs there remained only such plants that kept up with the constant upward growth of sphagnum mosses: Ledum, cassandra, podbel, cloudberry, cranberry, downy wood, some sedges.
It took sphagnum mosses about 1500 years to reach the pinnacle of prosperity. And when the climate in the taiga zone became cool and humid (about 2500 years ago), the most suitable conditions were created for sphagnum mosses to grow upwards and spread wide. And now we live in the era of maximum dominance of sphagnum mosses in the bogs of the taiga zone. By growing, peat bogs level the relief, change the hydrological regime and climate of vast areas.
And one more historical milestone in the development of sphagnum bogs: the formation of ridge and moss conditions their growth varies from 1 to 5 cm per year. In contrast, the vertical growth of sphagnum peatland is only 0.5-1 mm per year. Almost all grasses, shrubs and trees decompose in the active horizon of peat, and only 15-18 % of the annual phytomass growth goes into peat, and on sphagnum bogs it is mainly sphagnum.
Do we know what our peat reserves are in general and sphagnum fescue in particular? According to ground reconnaissance and aerial survey data, they have been determined quite accurately: the entire peat reserve is about 200 billion tons, and the fescue is about 4%, tons. е. 8 billion tons is not an insignificant figure. It was curious to calculate how much the amount of organic matter on sphagnum peatlands increases each year. It turns out that 12-15 million tons (if we take into account that 10 out of 86 million hectares of bogs in the USSR were developed).5 million hectares, and of the remaining 75.5 million ha approximately one third are sphagnum). In the following we will speak only of living sphagnum and sphagnum fescue, although there are a great many other peats in our bogs with different qualities and therefore different uses.
The medicinal merits of sphagnum mosses are determined by their antiseptic properties and high hygroscopicity, exceeding the absorption capacity of absorbent cotton several times. The antiseptic is probably the phenol-like substance sphagnol. In sphagnum mosses there is a lot of fiber, there are protein substances, mineral salts. Experimental studies have shown an undeniable bactericidal effect of extracts from sphagnum mosses on some pathogenic microbes (streptococci, staphylococci) and the microflora of purulent wounds.
For at least 1,000 years, people have been familiar with sphagnum relief mosses: This began about 2,000 years ago and continues to the present. The role of sphagnum mosses in this process was not insignificant, although not absolute. The living conditions for sphagnum mosses became even more suitable: there were more or less moistened places nearby. Over the last 2500 years, the specific mass of sphagnum mosses in the vegetation cover of taiga bogs has increased 20 times.
In all bogs, especially upland bogs, sphagnum mosses decompose very poorly. Often thick layers (up to 1-2 m) are composed of sphagnum peat almost untouched by decomposition. Such peat is called comfrey and retains most of the features of the living photosynthetic cover of sphagnum mosses. The reserves of living sphagnum mosses and sedges in our country are huge. Annually on 1 ha they grow 15-25 kg, and 3-4 years live phytomass reaches 60-75 kg/ha. Sphagnum mosses grow ever upward. Depending on the sphagnum moss species and ecological conditions, their growth varies from 1 to 5 cm per year. In contrast, the vertical growth of sphagnum peatland is only 0.5-1 mm per year. Almost all grasses, shrubs and trees decompose in the active horizon of peat, and only 15-18 % of the annual phytomass growth goes into peat, and on sphagnum bogs it is mainly sphagnum.
The combination of antimicrobial properties and hygroscopicity determines their use primarily as dressings, sometimes (in extreme situations) used even without sterilization. For greater convenience, loose sphagnum mosses are placed in gauze bags. By killing microbes, sphagnum mosses simultaneously absorb unpleasant odors. Extracts of sphagnum mosses containing sphagnol are used in some intestinal diseases, and baths are used to treat rheumatism.
In not so distant times, sphagnum peat was recommended as a disinfectant in epidemics of contagious diseases (cholera, plague). Sphagnum moss was used not only to disinfect wounds, but also to stop blood. Especially widely used sphagnum moss in the Great Patriotic War in partisan units. When bandages were in short supply, they were replaced with sphagnum bandages. On the basis of top peat, the eye medicine torfot was developed, which is also used for anemia and treatment of some skin diseases.
It is impossible not to mention one more unique feature of sphagnum mosses related to their bactericidal nature. Organic matter, getting into peat, as if preserved and preserved in peat in pristine form for a very long time: centuries and even millennia. For example, the trunk of a tree that fell into a piss hole and was buried by peat is preserved. In such wood, lifted from a peat deposit, its entire anatomical structure (cells, conducting bundles) is visible. Even cones, conifer needles and many different household items of ancient people are found in peat. And about 20 years ago the world was widely traveled sensation: a human corpse was found during peat mining in Jutland. As it turned out later, it had been in the peat for about 2000 years and had hardly been touched by decay. This was reported in detail in No. 2 of the 1972 edition of the UNESCO Courier. Needless to say, how important all these finds are to archaeologists. And not just for them, but for botanists, zoologists, and paleogeographers..
