May 7th, 2009
Ten Plants to Notice, Part Four
Hershey Children’s Garden Cool Plants
(#4 in a new series of 10)
For Fun Seeds and Fruit:
Red Horse Chestnut (Aesculus pavia)
Some adults bring their children to Hershey Children’s Garden and become engrossed in exciting adventures and programs — and possibly miss some of the horticultural nuances of this great garden space. Hershey Children’s Garden is a sophisticated and — now in its 10th anniversary season — mature garden with many plantings that any adult gardener or garden enthusiast would love to have in their personal greenspace. Who can blame them?
Here is the fourth plant in our series of 10 of our staff’s favorite Hershey Children’s Garden plants, along with their special and unusual properties to appreciate with a child.
If you take your child’s hand and head to the back corner of Hershey Children’s Garden. you will find the Bird Blind area. Any staff member or docent will be happy to show you the way. This small section of the garden is a sanctuary for birds, providing all the necessary ingredients for attracting birds to your backyard habitat. Birds need a source of food, shelter, water, places to perch and the all important sense of security. Birds like thickets, dense shrub formations. We have accommodated their instinctual request by growing a series of food supplying as well as aesthetically pleasing shrubs around the blind.
One of the largest shrubs is Red Horse chestnut. This is a truly attractive shrub with it’s typical buckeye shaped leaves and red flowers in late April/ early May. Large, smooth fruit replace fading candle-like flowers, splitting open in the fall. The entire family can have fun observing this clementine-sized fruit and holding the two large round hard seeds.
Sometimes our obsession with flowers overshadows other marvelous attributes of plants. Foliage, bark and berries sometimes provide interest and beauty long after the flowers have faded. September is a great season for berries. As I walk the garden my eyes are drawn to the blue pearls lining the beautyberry branches. I prefer the blue varieties over the ones with the white berries. Not quite as perfect but every bit as blue are the arrow wood viburnum berries. This one is on a glossy leafed variety called Chicago Lustre and is right now forming a blue wall for me along a sidewalk. In addition to blue, there are lots of reds starting to form this time of year. The firethorn, the winterberry and the Blue Princess hollies are starting to display reds that will last well into the winter and will contrast nicely with blankets of snow.  This is especially true of winterberry since it drops it leaves fairly early in the fall and holds it berries for most of the winter. The purple berries of the pokeweed and the red Kousa dogwood berries are spectacular right now. But it doesn’t take the birds and the squirrels long to figure out how good they taste. As a result, these two don’t quite hold their berries as long as I would like.
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