NATURE NOTESIT'S that time of year again when treasure is to be found, in the form of dark glossy horse chestnuts, nestling in their soft white, pithy bed and protected by sparsely spaced, soft spines; quite unlike those of the sweet chestnut.
Entirely unrelated, neither is native to our shores. However, the horse chestnut has worked its way into our landscape and our folklore, even though it has only been known here since the very late 16th century or possibly the early 17th century.
Nevertheless, it may surprise you to know the game for which 'conkers’ are used did not originally make use of the fruit of the horse chestnut but the nuts of the hazel — the cob nut — and even snailshells (sometimes still occupied!).
Despite the tree being used extensively in planting on large private estates, it was probably not until the mid-1800s, when Queen Victoria opened Bushey Park to the public, that the fruit became familiar to young children.
Bushey Park contains a fine avenue of these trees, planted by Sir Christopher Wren in 1699, lining the original carriage drive to Hampton Court.
In fact, Richard Mabey tells us, in Flora Britannica, the first record of horse chestnuts being used to play conkers was from the IW in 1848. The word 'conker’ is derived from the original name for the game, 'conquerors’, which is fairly self-explanatory: the champion nut (or shell etc) being the conqueror.
The horse chestnut has become a favourite tree of town planners and can be found on village greens and in streets and public parks up and down the country.
The tree naturalises easily, the fruit being extremely fertile, but they do become rather a liability in built-up areas: the fruits dropping to the ground and the missiles used by youngsters to encourage the tree to release its treasures.
In addition, the trees are prone to drop large branches following heavy rain in summer (please bear this in mind when choosing shelter from a shower!).
However, Keith Newbery and many others may be interested in another use for the conkers; they apparently exude a chemical which deters moths and spiders and what could be more attractive that a few bowls of glossy, mahogany-coloured horse chestnuts dotted about the house?
They also contain chemicals known as saponins (soap-like chemicals) which are popular additives to shampoos claiming to provide a glossy finish to the hair.
Despite generally being considered to be poisonous, there are Victorian recipes for making a flour from them, although the process which had to be followed to leach out the bitter flavour makes one wonder why they bothered.
During both world wars, the starch of the nuts was used to manufacture acetone and, in a neat twist, a chemical constituent of the nuts has been found to be effective in treating bruising and sprains in horses.
Apparently, in Turkey, the natural home of the tree, conkers were commonly used for this purpose in days gone by, so the Turks certainly seem to have known a thing or two. And now the Forestry Commission is growing thousands of acres of horse chestnuts to supply the pharmaceutical industry.
So, despite the disparaging remarks of Dr Oliver Rackham, an academic countryside specialist, who dismisses it as an exotic and as a 'sad example of a once glamorous species … being deprived of its meaning through being made the universal tree of bus stations’, I think most people would agree the English landscape would be the poorer without this tree, and it certainly seems to have many more strings to its bow than merely a decorative provider of attractive weapons.