THE HORSE - CHESTNUTS OR BUCKEYES Aesculus Hippocastanum, Linn.
At the head of this family stands a stately tree, native of the mountains of northern Greece and Asia Minor, which was introduced into European parks and planted there as an avenue tree when landscape gardening came into vogue. By way of England it came to America, and in Eastern villages one often sees a giant horse-chestnut, per haps the sole remnant of the street planting of an earlier day.
Longfellow's "spreading chestnut tree" was a horse chestnut. And the boys who watched the smith at his work doubtless filled their pockets with the shiny brown nuts and played the game of " conquerors " every autumn as regularly as they flew their kites in spring. What boy has not tied a chestnut to each end of a string, whirled them round and round at a bewildering rate of speed and finally let them fly to catch on telegraph wires, where they dangle for months and bother tidy folks? The glory of the horse-chestnut comes at blooming time, when the upturning branches, like arms of candel abra, are each tipped with a white blossom-cluster, pointed like a candle flame. (See illustration, page 54.) Each flower of the pyramid has its throat-dashes of yellow and red, and the curving yellow stamens are thrust far out of the dainty ruffled border of the corolla.
Bees and wasps make music in the tree-top, sucking the nectar out of the flowers. Unhappily for us humans, caterpillars of the leopard and tussock moths feed upon the tender tissues of this tree, defacing the foliage and making the whole tree unsightly by their presence.
Sidewalks under horse-chestnut trees are always littered with something the tree is dropping. In early spring the
shiny, wax-covered leaf buds cast off and they stick to slate and cement most tenaciously. Scarcely have the folded leaflets spread, tent-like, before some of them, damaged by wind or late frosts or insects' injury, begin to curl and drop, and as the leaves attain full size, they crowd, and this causes continual shedding. In early autumn the leaflets begin to be cast, the seven fingers gradually loosening from the end of the leaf-stalk; then comes a day when all of the foliage mass lets go, and one may wade knee deep under the tree in the dead leaves. The tree is still ugly from clinging leaf-stems and the slow breaking of the prickly husks that enclose the nuts.
With all these faults, the horse-chestnut holds its popu larity in the suburbs of great cities, for it lives despite smoke and soot. Bushey Park in London has five rows of these trees on either side of a wide avenue. When they are in bloom the fact is announced in the newspapers and all London turns out to see the sight. Paris uses the tree ex tensively; nearly twenty thousand of them line her streets, and thrive despite the poverty of the soil.
The American buckeyes are less sturdy in form and less showy in flower than the European species, but they have the horse-shoe print with the nails in it where the leaf stalk meets the twig. The brown nuts, with the dull white patch which fastens them in the husk, justifies the name "buckeye." One nibble at the nut will prove to any one that, as a fruit, it is too bitter for even horses. Bitter, astringent bark is characteristic of the family.