font settings

Font Size: Large | Normal | Small
Font Face: Verdana | Geneva | Georgia

Aesculus

(Genus)

Overview

[ Back to top ]

Trees or shrubs, deciduous. Winter buds large, viscid resinous or not, with several pairs of imbricate scales; scales abaxially glabrous or sparsely puberulent. Leaf blade 5-11-foliolate; leaflet blades without scattered, conspicuous glands, margin crenate to serrate or compoundly so. Thyrse cylindric or conic; branches simple; bracts absent. Flowers often large and showy. Sepals connate to form a tubular to campanulate calyx tube. Petals often unequal, base clawed, limb obovate, oblong, oblanceolate, or spatulate. Ovary without a gynophore; style long, slender; stigma depressed globose, entire or obscurely lobed. Capsule depressed globose to pyriform, without a long gynophore, often 1-seeded; pericarp usually smooth, often dotted, rarely verrucose or prickly. Seeds depressed globose to pyriform, large (2-7 cm) ; testa brown; hilum large, pale, occupying 1/3-1/2 of seed. x = 20.

Twelve species: mainly in North America (United States, Baja California in Mexico) and Asia from the Himalayas to Japan (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Japan, Kashmir, Laos, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam), one species in SE Europe (Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, former Yugoslavia) ; four species (one endemic, two introduced) in China.

Fang (Acta Sci. Nat. Univ. Szechuan. 1960(3) : 77-125. 1962) published a revision of the Hippocastanaceae in China, including 12 new species, for which six of the names were not validly published, either because no Latin description was provided, no type was indicated, or more than one type was indicated. Fang later (in FRPS) identified three of these entities as species of Araliaceae: "Aesculus chingsiensis" as Acanthopanax evodiifolius Franchet, "Aesculus chinpingensis" as Brassaiopsis glomerulata (Blume) Regel, and "Aesculus kwangsiensis" as Schefflera octophylla (Loureiro) Harms.

The leaves, flowers, and large seeds contain the poisonous compound aesculin.[1]

Photos

[ Back to top ]

Taxonomy

[ Back to top ]

The Genus Aesculus is further organized into finer groupings including:

Bibliography

[ Back to top ]
  • Fang Wen-pei. 1981. Hippocastanaceae. In: Fang Wen-pei, ed., Fl. Reipubl. Popularis Sin. 46: 274-289
  • Lo Hsien-shui & Chen Te-chao. 1985. Handeliodendron. In: Law Yuh-wu & Lo Hsien-shui, eds., Fl. Reipubl. Popularis Sin. 47(1): 61-62.

Footnotes

[ Back to top ]
  1. Nianhe Xia & Nicholas J. Turland "Aesculus". in Flora of China Vol. 12 Page 1, 2, 6. Published by Science Press (Beijing) and Missouri Botanical Garden Press. Online at EFloras.org.

Sources

[ Back to top ]
  • The distribution map on the Distribution tab comes from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and is used with permission.
  • Photographs on this page are copyrighted by individual photographers, and individual copyrights apply.
  • The GMapImageCutter is used under license from the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
  • The technology underlying this page, including the Image Browser and controls behind Keep Exploring, is owned by the BayScience Foundation. All rights are reserved.
Last Revised: September 22, 2009
2009/09/22 15:47:01