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Aesculus parviflora

August

Some of America’s buckeyes are trees ; many of them clearly, in gardener’s parlance, only shrubs. But why let a verbal nicety stand between us and what is certainly one of the great plants of late summer ?  Aesculus parviflora (which no doubt someone somewhere calls the bottle-brush bush) flowers with the hydrangeas and the eucryphias, slowly spreading by layers to fill as much of the garden as your are prepared to allow it. This bush, now 14 feet high, has advanced where I have let it to make a wall 20 yards long, now bristling with its delicate narrow versions of the horse-chestnut candle.

William Bartram found it in the woods of the Carolinas, so it must have been in cultivation here for nearly 300 years, without ever becoming common. It seems ready to grow anywhere ; a detached layer soon becomes a new plant. Is it perhaps not emphatic enough, with modest-sized palmate leaves on a quite lightweight chassis ?

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