I’m a slave to my horse-chestnut tree

Trying to work in my garden shed at this time of year is tricky. I will be crouched over my keyboard, face screwed up in concentration, when suddenly there’s a tremendous bang just above my head. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a conker falling from a horse-chestnut tree and hitting the roof of my office. It happens about once an hour, just infrequently enough to startle me every time.

I’ve grown to hate this tree over the years. It isn’t just the astonishingly loud noise the conkers make. It’s also the damage the tree does to the lawn. A typical conker will bounce off the shed and land on the grass, where it sits until a squirrel darts out of nowhere, picks up the mahogany orb with its two front paws, then uses its teeth to peel away some of the brown outer layer before digging a hole in the lawn and burying it. Why the squirrels do this is a bit of a mystery, given that the flesh is supposed to be poisonous and they rarely return to dig them up. It’s as though they’ve been enslaved by the tree and are labouring, zombie-like, to plant its seeds all over my lawn.

But the conkers aren’t the worst of it. In springtime, the tree starts shedding these reddish-brown buds which then get tangled in the dog’s fur. Their stickiness is quite incredible – Nature Journal even published a paper about it in 2020 (‘Robust, universal, and persistent bud secretion adhesion in horse-chestnut trees’). The only way to remove them from Mali’s coat is to cut them out, leaving her covered in bald patches. If the children run into the garden in their socks during the spring months, I scream at them to stop because if they tread on just one of these things the socks have to be thrown away.