In May the Horse Chestnut is in flower (5), and a wonderful sight it is; the tree is laden with snowy spikes, which look like great candles set on a bushy Christmas tree. A giant’s nosegay, it is sometimes called by the country people, this great tree, with its wealth of fan-shaped leaves and these stiff snow-white spikes rising from every branch. The lowest flowers (6) in each spike open first, and they are called by botanists perfect flowers, because each one has all its parts complete. They have a green bell-shaped calyx with five divisions round the mouth. Within this calyx are five separate white petals, one of which is much larger than the others, and these petals have many hairs on them and are splashed with crimson and yellow stains. In the throat of this flower there are seven stamens with curved stalks and pale salmon-coloured heads, and among these you can see a slender curved green thread rising from the seed-vessel, which lies hidden in the centre of the flower. The upper flowers on the spike have no seed-vessel, and they fall off as soon as their stamen dust is scattered. The spike may bear thirty or forty flowers, yet only a few will remain to produce seeds after the beautiful petals are withered. When this has happened the seed-vessel grows larger and larger till it becomes a rough, horny green ball (7) studded with short spines. It is not bristly all over like the Sweet Chestnut fruit ball, but is hard and smooth, and its spines are thick and clumsy, with a wide space between each. If you open one of these balls before the fruit is ripe, you will find a nut inside, which is white and polished like a piece of ivory and which fits the covering closely. But if you leave the fruit to ripen on the tree, then the green ball splits into three pieces, and you see that the nut (7) inside has shrunk a little and has become a rich, dark brown. It is so glossy that it looks as if it had just been oiled, and it is almost round. There is a white scar at the foot of the nut, where it was fastened to the inside of the green ball. In the Sweet Chestnut, you remember, there were always two or three nuts inside each bristly ball, and these nuts were dull, and not glossy like those of the Horse Chestnut. Although horses will not eat this fruit, deer and cattle and sheep all like it. In this country the nuts are usually left to rot on the ground where they fall. After they decay these nuts may be pounded and made into a kind of soap; they contain a juice which is said to be good for cleansing. The Horse Chestnut is a very fast-growing tree. In fourteen years a tree grown from a nut will be large enough to sit under, and the wood, on this account, is less hard and lasting than woods that have taken longer to grow. It is used for cabinet-making and for flooring. [Illustration: PLATE XXXII THE CEDAR 1. Cedar Tree 2. Leaf Spray 3. Stamen Flower 4. Seed Flower 5. Closed Cone and Open Cone]