Features

Red horsechestnuts are blooming now. It’s an interesting phenomenon: the rosy-red flowers are in great big stacks, but somehow easy to miss as you drive by. You walk by, or sit at a stoplight, and suddenly they’re astonishing. In a big mature tree like the handsome one at the southeast corner of Sacramento and Hopkins, the foliage is deep and thick enough to make the flowers less prominent to the fast-passing eye; in younger trees like those near the Berkeley Bowl, they’re like big candles on the twigs. 

Red horsechestnut has a scanty history, being a fairly recent hybrid: its formal name is Aesculus x carneus (that middle initial betrays its bi-species origin). Its lineage is distinguished and interesting on both sides, though. One parent is the European horsechestnut. The other is an eastern American native, red buckeye. Horsechestnuts are so called because they’re bitter and inedible to humans, but can be processed into a feed supplement for horses and cattle—though pigs, who relish true chestnuts, won’t eat it. (Or fide some sources, because the leaf scar on a twig looks like a hoofprint.) 

“Horsechestnut” and “buckeye” are generally interchangeable when people talk about the fruits. They do look like chestnuts, usually a bit less flattened and with that attachment scar on one side that makes the “eye.” There’s a folk belief that carrying one in your pocket protects against rheumatism, or brings luck. There’s also a trade in folk or “alternative” medicine using extracts of horsechestnut for assorted vein problems like swollen legs. I think I’d stick to wearing compression stockings myself, as the compounds are said to interact badly with such ordinary drugs as aspirin. 

Like most drugs, they come from a source that has its own dangers. The flowers of red horsechestnut are toxic to eat, and can be used to stun fish if for some reason you want to stun a fish. Why do that? I’m told that a compound of the local family member, California buckeye, was used by the original people here for grocery shopping—a handful in a pond or backwater would stun the fish in it; they’d rise to the surface for easy choosing, and when the stuff dispersed and diluted in the water, the rest would come to, shake their (presumably slightly hung-over) fishy heads and go on about their business. 

In the Pennsylvania neighborhood where I grew up, there was a great big European horsechestnut growing in a great big yard just up the hill. We took part in the great kid tradition of throwing the plentiful nuts—”conkers”—at each other when they ripened and fell every year. Really mean kids would pick up the ones with the spiky seedcoat still on them, very carefully, and throw those—the same kids who’d put a rock in a snowball. 

Red horsechestnuts don’t seem to drop many nuts, at least here. If you find one, you can grow your own tree, as this is one of the few hybrids that come true from seed.<