Day 360: I hope to follow this post with another comparing horse chestnuts to edible chestnuts, but I did not think to photograph the leaves of the several species which stand in Morton's Gust Backstrom Park. Nor did I think to gather any of the fallen fruit (fruit?) from beneath the trees, possibly because my only previous attempt at roasting chestnuts was unsuccessful. Thanks to YouTube, I now know a better way to go about it and am kicking myself for not collecting enough for a culinary experiment. In any event, these are horse chestnuts, Aesculus hippocastanum, inedible and mildly toxic, related to Lychees and sometimes called "conkers." True chestnuts are members of the genus Castanea. The nuts are easy to differentiate when in the husk; true chestnuts resemble large, thickly spiny burrs whereas horse chestnuts have fewer spines.
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