September 26, 2006

Horse Chestnut trees across the south, and increasingly other parts of England, are dying.

The causes are complex. The drty weather is one, infestation by Cameraria ohridella, the leaf miner moth, is another: but the most serious problem is a mysterious increase in the incidence of Phytophthora, or bleeding canker (perhaps, or perhaps not, something to do with a new variety of the disease, P Ramorum, responsible for Sudden Oak Death in the US). The full extent of the problem is not yet clear, but it could be on the scale of the Dutch Elm disease which virtually eliminated elms from Britain some years ago. Could this mean the end of the traditional sport of conkers?

posted by Plegmund 18 years ago
  • Blast! That's a damn shame. I had such sport with conkers in my childhood. That'll be a great tradition lost. :(
  • something like the leaf miner moth infestation hit paris last year. a long row of horse chestnuts opposite my office was badly affected. also, i was in pere lachaise cemetery at the weekend, and one avenue had been affected - strange to see two rows of trees brown and withered while the rows around them are still green. tons of conkers on the ground in the cemetery. my son enjoyed putting them in his mouth.
  • Typically, I used to cheat with my conkers. I used to soak them in vinegar. However, it was a bit hard to get rid of the smell. Man, we had fun collecting them. Wow, memories.
  • /starts weeping jag for inner child
  • i used to put mine in the linen closet, near the boiler. this was alleged to make them tougher. soaking in varnish would probably be a good approach.
  • Twenty minutes in a low oven would toughen them up. They tell me.
  • Did you play stamps? That usually did for any of my promising ones.
  • NOOOOOOO!!!!!! We had such a grand one in our front yard in Oxford when I was a kid, though I will confess I valued it more for the big owl who lived in it than the nuts. My bedroom window was next to the tree, and this vantage allowed me to hear (and sometimes glimpse) the owl as she hunted in the evenings. Certainly hope things take a turn for the better in England and Europe. Trees are marvelous things, and sadly under a lot of stress now from pollution and changing weather.
  • God, I love trees. You lived in Oxford as a bairn? Good lord, what a wonderful thing! And an Owl!
  • "Did you play stamps?" Testing them by stamping on them? Vague memories of something like that. The 'big boys' would subject your treasured conkers to it. I must confess I've forgot all the rules of the actual game. I think I remember having to call out something when you took a swing at another player's conker & missed, but buggered if I can think what it was.
  • if the conker falls the other player can yell "stamps!" and stomp on it. Unless you yell "no stamps!" first. Gah, everybody knows that, Chy.
  • That's sad. I grew up in New Haven, the Elm City With No Elm Trees (because they all died) and then watched all the Hemlocks die too. But I actually found my first horsechestnut in years yesterday walking to the post office! Then I hid it in Mr Cobalt's pillow.
  • Yes, the first time we went to live in England I was just a bit past my fourth birthday. My third-oldest brother, Alex, really got to be tops at conkers (he was about nine, a good age for it. But I'm afraid the sport impressed me as rather pointless, (quite unlike marbles, where at least you could win shiny spheres of glass by the fistful, though I was seriously handicapped by our moving around so much - every time we did so, there was a whole new set of neighborhood variants or entire new games to learn). But the conkers I usually preferred to make into little nut people and animals. Almost forgot: one really nasty variant of conkers played at a school I attended in England - you knotted a conker into one end of your pocket handkerchief and set about whacking your opponent with it. He who first cried out or flinched was deemed the loser. It was called duelling, I think. A savage game, but I rather enjoyed it, being a complete young barbarian. I was so used to being mauled and pounded by my older brothers I never cried, so I suppose I was a natural at this sadistic entertainment.
  • Need to correct something above there: I was a shade over three years old, not four. My memory back then was not burdened by the complexity of a calendar -- a condition back into which I've tended to slide throughout my life.
  • We have loads of these trees by mine. Always attracts kids with sticks (and sometimes their dads) hurling them into the branches to bring the conkers down. I love the racing horse shine of a fresh conker.
  • Stupid sods, nearly killing my dog with a stick, when the ones you bring down with a stick are never ripe anyway. Cretins. Agree kit re: shine. Inject them with superglue! If you have a syringe handy...
  • This is sad.
  • an article in french on cameraria ohridella. it seems to have spread across france in three years.
  • JB, yes, this is sad. A lovely tree, and one of my favorites. MonkeyFilter: I rather enjoyed it, being a complete young barbarian. Good to hear that Bees. See you little Monkeys, it is possible to overcome your barbaric selves.
  • *growls, chews on thread*
  • Damn, that explains the withered horse chestnut trees I've been seeing around London. In America, weren't the horse chestnuts the only ones to survive the blight when the regular chestnuts died? When I came to live in Europe, I was enchanted by the chestnut trees with their ice-cream-cone flowers. I think of it as a particularly generous tree-- never gives you one leaf when it can give you five, or one flower when it can give you a dozen. When you're feeling sad, all you have to do is find a flowering chestnut tree and imagine it's offering you all its ice cream cones. Cheers you right up. Love conkers all.
  • Trees are wonderful; but tree species are being threatened now all over the world. New Zealand's magnificent Kauri trees under attack from an organism akin to that which caused the potato blight in Ireland. And in North America, the western aspens are dying, including the roots.
  • Not the aspens!! Not the lovely white aspens whose leaves look so shimmery in the wind! What I hope happens with both these tree blights is that the authorities leave enough trees standing that the few who resist/survive the affliction will become obvious, and can be bred from.
  • woe and weeping, as fall the leaves -- and we could use help, you elves, now earth's grand trees can't look after themselves
  • I think the experts are still hopeful about the horse chestnuts - they want to see how many trees survive this year before doing anything drastic.
  • The aspens are indeed going, going, not-quite-gone. This summer I spent a dire week in rural Colorado experiencing the joys of a closed-down ski resort with my parents and 89-year-old grandmother; the vast swaths of ghostly paper-brown dying aspens added a touch of gothy misery that made it that much more, um, fun. NPR ran a story on the aspen blight, if you're interested.