A small family, widely distributed; trees or shrubs, with opposite,
compound leaves, no stipules and terminal clusters of irregular
flowers, some perfect and some with only pistils or only stamens; the
calyx tubular or bell-shaped, with five, unequal lobes or teeth; the
petals four or five, unequal, with claws; the stamens five to eight,
with long filaments; the ovary superior, with no stalk, three-celled,
with a slender style; the capsule leathery, roundish or slightly
three-lobed, smooth or spiny, with one to three, large, polished seeds.
There are a good many kinds of Aesculus, or Horse Chestnut, natives of
America and Asia; the leaves palmately compound, with toothed leaflets;
the flowers of two sorts, the fertile ones few in number, near the top
of the cluster, with long, thick styles, and the sterile flowers with
short styles.
[Sidenote: =California Buckeye=
_Aésculus Califórnica_
=White
Spring, summer
California=]
One of our handsomest western shrubs, usually from ten to fifteen feet
tall, with gray bark, and dark bluish-green foliage, the leaflets from
five to seven in number, glossy on the upper side, pale and dull on the
under, and firm in texture. The flowers have a rather heavy scent and
are about an inch across, with four or five, slightly irregular, white
petals, which become pink in fading, a pinkish ovary and long stamens
with curling, white filaments, unequal in length, with buff anthers.
They are crowded in a magnificent, pyramidal cluster, about a foot
long, which has a pinkish-red, downy stem, and the buds are also downy
and pinkish, so that the color effect is warm-pink above, merging into
cream-white below, the whole made feathery by the long stamens. The
shrub has a rounded top of rich green foliage, symmetrically ornamented
with spires of bloom, standing up quite stiffly all over it. The large,
leathery pod contains a big, golden-brown nut, supposed to be poisonous
to cattle. The leaves fall off very early in the season, leaving the
pods hanging on the bare branches. This is at its best in the mountain
valleys of middle California, sometimes becoming a good-sized tree.
[Illustration: California Buckeye--Aesculus Californica.]