Friday Fabulous Flower - It's red, and it's a buckeye

Too many nice things flowering right now making it hard to choose; 5 different azaleas, 6 or so different peonies, a Carolina silver bell, a couple of Magnolias, a couple of Calycanthus bushes, some Deutzias, one unknown (probably an Actea), until it does flower, a pearl bush, lots of wild geranium, and so on.  So today's shrub gets overlooked because while attractive it isn't gaudy, but makes a nice addition to shrub border or a woodland edge, the red buckeye, Aesculus pavia, a native species.  Don't confuse this with a red-flowered horse chestnut, although it is another Aesculus.  Doing some foreign traveling, so TPP may be more irregular at posting than usual for a couple of weeks.

Friday Fabulous Flower - Red Horse chestnut

It's been a busy week gardening and field work, and neither is very conducive to blogging. Still the FFF must be honored even a day late.  Here's an image of a new addition to our university's quad, a red horse chestnut, rather one with red flowers. The horse chestnut is a pretty spectacular tree in flower, massive flowering, huge display of big conical inflorescences, all at once, a so-called "big bang" flowering, but the flowers are white although with bits of color up close. This ornamental is not a mutant; it's a hybrid called Aesculus x carnea. So not a true horse chestnut at all although that is one of the parents, the other being the quite handsome small red buckeye that TPP has featured on FFF before. This tree has good cold hardiness for having a southern parent and is more of a tree, less of a shrub.  As a taxonomic note buckeyes used to be in their own family, but now molecular data has placed them in the soapberry family, one not very familiar sailing in the N. temperate zone, but that's still better than the old stand alone family that told us nothing except they weren't real chestnuts at all.  Sigh, one more genus to refile in the herbarium.  

Friday Fabulous Flower - Red Buckeye

TPP hasn't mentioned red buckeye (Aesculus pavia) before and that can't be explained. For one thing, our red buckeyes are from the point of view of the Phactor's kitchen observatory behind the Carolina silverbell tree, which is pretty spectacular, so the buckeyes are easily overlooked from afar. The red buckeyes began flowering before the silverbell and now the silverbell is totally done and the red buckeyes still have an eye-catching display. Although they grow into a small tree, ours have remainded bushes and they do well on a shady margin. A large burr oak keeps smashing one of the red buckeyes as though it didn't like it. So clearly they can be maintained in a smaller size by careful pruning.  Although this cannot be confirmed, apparently hummingbirds like red buckeye; hummingbirds are regular but not common visitors to our gardens and since the buckeyes are way out there in the back garden, hummingbirds are too small to notice at that distance. At any rate red buckeyes are a highly recommended flowering shrub/tree and generally they are under planted. Around here the larger, ornamental horse chesnuts are becoming quite popular, which in spite of their name are another species of Aesculus; with their really gaudy inflorescences these horse chestnuts do provide quite a flowering spectacle, but they also become a big tree.  The smaller buckeyes, bottlebrush and red, are more versatile, when you can find them, and they can be a bit slow getting started especially from seed.