Because its fruit was pear-shaped and green, we mistook it at first for a pear, but when we inspected one that had fallen we found that the big fruits contain beautiful mahogany nuts, called buckeyes. But Aesculus octandra , the Yellow Buckeye, has a smooth fruit we had never seen before. Buckeyes have been polished and carried around for good luck by generations of people. Some swear they prevent arthritis, rheumatism, and headaches. Bawdier legends link them to male sexual prowess because buckeyes are testicular in shape and size.
Buckeyes are distant relatives to chestnuts.
In 1904, Chinese chestnuts imported to New York brought in a bark fungus that infested and killed in 40 years billions of chestnut trees between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. I have one horse chestnut, a buckeye s relative, that I smuggled home from Germany, from the grounds of the Diet of Worms where Martin Luther was tried for his reform efforts. A more polished reminder of balanced continuity and change, or of preservation and renewal, is courtly Beaumont Inn itself.