
Yes, those horse chestnuts are beautiful but – for those who suffer from pollen allergies, as Jacquie pointed out in a comment, they are lethal….
Normally it is male plants that are particularly dangerous for pollen sufferers. But horse chestnuts have perfect flowers, which mean that they are both male and female – so are still horrible for hay fever sufferers. For more on why, see this blog about Tom Ogren and his crusade to banish male trees from a few years ago.
We have been up to our necks in preparations for our ‘virtual’ FreeFrom Food Awards presentation next Tuesday so I am afraid that it was just a late dash to the heath tonight. But I did catch these two rather lovely images of the boating pond.


And then on the way I passed by the ladies pond – and the fountain was playing in the distance so I leaned over the railings so that you could watch…
(If you want to see the video you will need to click onto the blog as the email notification does not include the video.)
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Per the horse chestnuts and allergies: Their flowering systems are a bit more complicated than most. Yes, they do make many perfect flowers (flowers with both male and female parts in the same flower), however, they also make numerous other flowers that are all-male. This flowering system would be called polyandros. Those all male flowers are less showy, and they all will shed plenty of pollen.
Here is something I published on this in 2004, in the book, Safe Sex in the Garden: Polygamous flowering plants will have both perfect-flowered flowers and single-sexed flowers on the same plant. A buckeye tree is a good example of polygamous flowering. The buckeye in bloom will have great clusters of flowers on the ends of each branch. Often these clusters will be a foot or more in length. On the tips of the flowering branches all the blooms are perfect-flowers, each individual flower complete with fertile female and male sex organs. However, six inches or so above the tips of the branch there will be many unisexual (one-sex) flowers, and with buckeye these will always be male-only flowers. The clusters of buckeye flowers are Nature-designed to be pollinated by both insect and the wind, and as a result pollen from the male-only flowers indeed can become airborne and cause allergy.
Another note about the horse chestnut trees, bee keepers don’t like them because often the pollen is deadly to bees. On occasion bees working them will produce poisonous honey.
They are handsome though….just don’t plant one too close to your house!
Thank you Tom! I was hoping that you would enlighten us, as indeed you have! Can we assume that what you call a buckeye is what we would call a horse chestnut or do they just behave similarly?