The horse-chestnut tree in bloom is a superb sight—"a pyramid of green supporting a thousand pyramids of white!" Each blossom of the dense cluster has in its throat dashes of red and yellow, and the curving, yellow stamens are thrust far out of the ruffled border of the corolla. If they were rare flowers, they would be admired as orchids are now.
Few of the flowers set seed, as few have perfect pistils. The cluster does quite enough if it matures one or two burs. In fall the small boy assails the trees, knocks off and husks the smooth brown nuts, and how glowing and soft are the colours of them! They are "Conquerors" in games which recur as regularly among town children in the autumn as do games of marbles and the flying of kites in the spring.
The fall of the horse-chestnut leaves is a sudden and absolute surrender. When the time comes, the leaflets and the stem that bore them fall separately. The leaf has evidently expected to come apart, for the joints are perfect: there is no tearing nor breaking involved in the process.
The base of the leaf stalk leaves a scar on the twig which is strikingly like the print of a horse's hoof. This may have
given its name to the tree. Or was it, as Gerarde explains, "for that the people of the east countries do with the fruit thereof cure their horses of the cough, shortness of breath, and such like diseases"? More probably the coarse, large, uneatable nuts are responsible; many rank-growing plants unfit for human food are similarly named, e. g., horse mint, horse nettle, horse sugar.
The great fault of the horse chestnut is that it is continually dropping something. The bud scales first make a considerable litter; then the flowers fall like snow. The unripe fruits drop in all stages, and the leaves that choke to death in the crowded interior turn rusty yellow and drop all summer. It also casts too dense The Buckeyes a shade, and in some regions is stripped of its foliage by caterpillars zovered with tufts of white hairs—the larvx of the tussock moth. Few people who take thought will choose this tree when elms and hard maples can be had for planting.