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Horse chestnut ordinary - a familiar attribute of many cities, decorating park alleys, squares, boulevards, personal plots, streets and gardens. Fifteen members of the horse chestnut genus can be found in North America, China, Europe and Japan. In Kiev, horse chestnuts are trees that appeared in the first half of the XIX century. They became the "calling card" of the Ukrainian capital, and the image of the leaf and inflorescence turned into a natural symbol of the city.
Deciduous tree has taken root in the European part of Russia, where the climate differs significantly from the mild climatic conditions of Southern Europe - the birthplace of the plant. On the
Balkan Peninsula, where horse chestnuts are still found in the wild, trees are called relic trees, since they have been inhabitants of the local mountain forests since ancient times. Today chestnuts, wherever there are appropriate conditions for their growth, are favorites of park design.
Description
Chestnut - a tree (photo presented in the article) decorative.
It is always attractive, especially in the warm season, when its wide crown is covered with a bizarre mosaic of large leaves, consisting of five to seven fan-shaped leaves. In May, at a time of abundant flowering, chestnuts are trees that fascinate with the incredible beauty of bell-shaped white with a pink tint. Inflorescences of a pyramidal shape (erect brushes) resemble candles lit up among dark green foliage. Later, large fruits ripen on the branches - brown seeds with a white scar at the base, hidden in tricuspid capsules with thorns. In August and September, the horse chestnut tree surprises again. The boxes are opened, and the shiny, as if polished, seeds, called in ordinary speech simply chestnuts or horse chestnuts, showered on the ground. There is an opinion that the chestnut was given the name "horse" for the color of the peel of the fruit, resembling the skin of a bay horse.
Application
The fruits of horse chestnut, in contrast to the nuts of the seed chestnut, are inedible, but they are a valuable raw material for the production of medicines.
In pharmaceuticals, flowers and bark are also used. Medicines from this plant - tablets, ointments, drops, capsules, suppositories - are used to treat vascular diseases common in our time. Traditional medicine uses chestnut-based products to treat leg veins and hemorrhoids. Healers recommend using externally alcohol tincture of horse chestnut flowers to relieve arthritic and rheumatic pains. Horse chestnut wood has no commercial value, but is of value to woodcarvers. The plant is a honey plant. Horse chestnuts - trees with a domed crown, reaching great heights, interesting at all times of the year. That is why they are of great value for landscaping cities. In addition, according to environmentalists, trees of this species perfectly clean the air in cities from exhaust gases. According to scientists, one tree can clean up to 20 thousand cubic meters of gas polluted air.