It’s a great time of year to be a Horse Chestnut. Many other trees are yet to don their leafy cover, and you are already bustling with green, and holding your blushing flower-candles high.
The Horse Chestnut is generous, offering not one but five or seven leaflets to a stalk. By Autumn, those pink-white flowers have been pollinated into the back to school bounty of those famous conkers. Don’t try eating them.
Introduced to these lands from Turkey in the 1600s, the Horse Chestnut is unlikely to be confused with anything else in our garden. The Sweet Chestnut sounds like a younger cousin, but isn’t even distantly related, and is more likely to be the older.
The three largest Horse Chestnuts are all to be found in Great Britain, proving once and for all that migrants can flourish wherever they land.
