Horse chestnut

Aesculus hippocastanum

Family · Sapindaceae · Poisonous

Toxic

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This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.

Emergency

Horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) — Dominicus Johannes Bergsma, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Dominicus Johannes Bergsma, CC BY-SA 4.0

The shade tree of parks and avenues, with candelabra of white flowers in spring and green husks in autumn. The nut looks like a sweet chestnut and is not: the confusion sends children to hospital every year.

Where it grows

Town and roadside · Fields and pasture

Also known as

conker tree

In flower

In fruit

How to tell it

A compound leaf, five to seven leaflets all springing from the same point like the fingers of an open hand. The husk is green and nearly smooth, with thick, widely spaced spines that do not prick, and opens on ONE round seed, smooth and glossy, with no point or tassel. The true chestnut has simple toothed leaves, one at a time along the twig, and husks covered in fine needle-like spines holding two or three flattened nuts, each with a hairy point.

What it is confused with

Sweet chestnut

Castanea sativa

Confusion that poisons

A simple toothed leaf, not a hand of leaflets. A husk with fine dense spines that really do prick, and two or three nuts flattened on one side with a hairy point at the tip.

Open sheet →Side by side

What it is for

None to encourage

The seed contains aesculin and saponins and causes vomiting, cramps and diarrhoea; it has been used in pharmacy extracts for venous circulation, which is a dosed preparation and not a nut picked off the ground.

Where it occurs

Sources

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