The earliest references to the tree in Western Europe crop up in Vienna in the late 16th century. While heading up the royal garden of Maximlian II, botanist Carolus Clusius was gifted a small tree from David Ungnand, the Imperial Ambassador to the Emperor of the Turks. Eventually, the tree found its way to America, as a popular ornamental tree. E.H. Wilson, a plant collector and eventually the Keeper of the Arnold Arboretum in the early 1900’s wrote “if a census of opinion were taken as to which is the most handsome exotic flowering tree in the eastern part of the United States there is little doubt but that it would be overwhelmingly in favor of the Horse chestnut.” I suspect that my parents’ horse chestnut sprouted amidst this fervor of botanical enthusiasm.



Although my family laid down the hops and barley generations ago, our surname is Brewer. Horse chestnuts are integral to Bavarian beer gardens. Specimens of the tree dangle their branches over each of the 172 beer gardens in Munich. At first, the tradition was practical. Beer gardens burst onto the social scene in Germany in the early 1700s and brewers needed to keep large stores of ingredients in cool moist spaces. So they built underground basements and topped these with groves of horse chestnut trees, whose shade helped to maintain a constant temperature. The tree’s palmate leaves are among the first to bud in the spring, and its spreading branches cast dark cooling shadows. Each spring, the horse chestnut produces towering flowers with cascading red, white, and yellow blossoms. The tree’s dramatic May display aligns with the start of the Bavarian beer garden season, serving as an organic marketing campaign.

The horse chestnut derives its name from Turkey, where the seeds, called conkers, were reportedly fed to horses suffering from respiratory problems. More recently, the aescin in conkers has been successful in treating chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), varicose veins, and hemorrhoids. The dosages must be small, because the conker is actually poisonous to humans, horses, and most other animals, with deer and wild boar among the notable exceptions. Conkers, which are protected by a spiky husk, are also the crucial pieces in a British children’s game of the same name which originated on the Isle of Man in the 1800s.

So the horse chestnut is a colorful umbrella for beer gardens, a semi-poisonous seasonal toy for children, an alternative medicine for varicose veins, and a 100-foot-tall May boquet. The tree is also a supporting character across literature. It is said that Lewis Carroll first spotted the shadowy Cheshire Cat in the branches of a horse chestnut in the Deanery Garden in Oxford. Perhaps most famously, “Under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ode to the common man, The Village Blacksmith. This horse chestnut, which once stood on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was cut down as the street was widened in 1876. The children of Cambridge presented Longfellow with a chair made of the tree’s remains, which is still on display at the Longfellow House.