Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Linnaeus borrowed its genus name from a Roman word for an oak whose acorns people ate, an odd choice for a tree that is neither an oak nor edible. Most flowers on each spire carry {stamens} only and fall without setting anything, and a fleshy lobed {nectary} ring sits at the base of the {stamens}, so a spire of a hundred blooms leaves two or three fruits. Bark, leaves and seed all carry frothing {saponin} compounds, eight to twenty-six percent of the seed by weight, which once served as a laundry lather and which make every part bitter and poisonous. Though it lines avenues from Dublin to Moscow, it grows wild only in a scatter of Balkan mountain ravines, reaching about 5,000 feet (1,500 m) in Greece, Bulgaria and Albania. Its leaves sit in opposing pairs, each cut right to the base into five to seven stalkless {leaflets} that spread from the top of one long stalk like the fingers of a hand. Through winter its bare shoots are tipped with fat dark red-brown resting buds 1 to 2 inches (2.5 to 5 cm) long, coated in a resin sticky enough to pull at a glove. In May it raises hundreds of erect conical {panicles} 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 cm) tall, each white flower marked with a throat blotch that shifts from yellow to crimson once bees have worked it. When a leaf falls it leaves a scar shaped like an upturned horseshoe, with a curved row of bundle scars standing in for the nail holes. Its epithet couples the Greek word for a hoofed draught animal with an old name for a nut tree, and blacksmiths once dosed broken-winded animals of exactly that kind with its ground seed. A tiny leaf-mining moth first described in 1986 from the shores of Lake Ohrid in North Macedonia now browns and shrivels its canopy across most of Europe by August. Seed extracts standardised for the {saponin} escin are sold across Europe as a treatment for aching, swollen legs caused by failing vein valves. Children thread its glossy brown seeds onto shoelaces each autumn to swing one against another, and adults routinely mistake its spiny husks for those of the sweet nut roasted at winter markets, which belongs to a completely different family.

Accepted Answer

Aesculus hippocastanum

Name That Plant #081