Another Duh Moment

I’m having fun with a plant identification app on my phone. It’s called PlantNet and seems to be extremely accurate. Just this morning I decided to take an image of one of my shade tree’s fruits and realized a very silly mistake. It’s not a buckeye tree at all but a common horse chestnut. ~shakes head~ Somehow my memory got twisted around over the decades.

To my surprise, PlantNet also identified this
as the peculiar squirting cucumber...

Then again, I feel somewhat vindicated after stumbling upon this article. Horse chestnut and buckeye trees resemble one another as they’re in the same genus. And there is so much more I’m learning!

Fun facts:

My tree is the red variety, meaning it has rosy flowers versus white. A woman who saw it in the spring of 2023 not only pulled over to inquire about it, she brought her mother over this past April.

And it’s a hybrid between the red buckeye (!) and white chestnut.

The English call the nuts ‘conkers’. And I understand why after being pelted during that very windy day. lol Thank heaven they’re small and quite soft.

A tasty fall treat for deer, the seeds are toxic to most mammals, including horses. Thanks to this article from the UK I learned two things about the name.

One, a fallen leaf creates a horseshoe shaped scar on the twig, complete with what look like nail holes. I’ll have to look for this come autumn.

And before modern veterinary medicine, crushing conkers released a medicinal compound that, while toxic to smaller animals, helped relieve horses suffering a cough.

Last but not least, harvested seeds are supposedly easy to cultivate over winter. I may have to try this if only for fun.

The entire tree gets covered by these...

Weren’t so-called primitive peoples incredibly inventive? Do you think a horse chestnut sapling would make a nice gift?

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