Aesculus wangii Seeds | Wang’s Buckeye
LATIN NAME: Aesculus wangii
COMMON NAME: Wang’s Buckeye
Plant Profile
Aesculus wangii is one of the few buckeyes that becomes a real tree, reaching twenty metres in the limestone mountains of south-eastern Yunnan and northern Vietnam. The leaves are five to seven leaflets on a long stalk, and the flower spike is upright and white rather than red.
It was named for the Chinese botanist Wang Qiwu, who collected in Yunnan in the 1930s, and it is known from a handful of valleys where the forest has not been cleared. The species is listed as endangered, and its remaining sites are small. The bark is grey and smooth when young and peels in thin flakes on old trees, and the winter buds are large and sticky.
Science & Biotechnology
The tree flowers in April and sets very little fruit, for reasons that are not fully understood. Hand pollination raises the set in cultivation, which suggests that pollinator service is limiting at low population density rather than that the ovules are sterile.
Its habitat is the reason for its rarity: it grows in pockets of soil on limestone karst, at a thousand to eighteen hundred metres, where the ground drains within minutes of rain and dries hard between storms. Seedlings are found in shade on rock ledges, not in the valley floor forest, and the species appears to need the gaps that rockfall creates. The wood is pale, soft and close-grained, of no commercial value, and the bark is thin enough that the tree is easily killed by fire in the grass layer beneath it.
Uses & Benefits
The tree is grown in a few botanical collections outside China, mainly as a conservation subject, and its seed is not edible without processing. There is no trade in the timber, since the remaining stands are protected and the wood is soft.
In its native districts the tree is left standing near villages for shade, and the seed was formerly used as a fish poison in the same way as other buckeyes. That practice has stopped, and the tree is now more often a marker of old forest than a resource. Seed has been distributed through botanical garden exchanges since the 1990s, and most plants outside China descend from two or three collections.
Growing from Seed
Seed is scarce and should be sown within days of collection, since it is recalcitrant. Use a deep pot with a gritty, lime-rich mix, sow the nut on its side and cover it with two centimetres, and keep it at fifteen to twenty degrees. The radicle emerges first and the shoot may take two months.
Give the seedling a position with morning sun and shelter from wind, and expect slow growth for the first three years. The tree resents root disturbance, so plant it out young and do not move it again. In a cold climate it needs a sheltered wall, since late frost damages the new growth.
Our Take
A rare tree for a collector with patience and space, grown for its white spikes and its story rather than for any crop. Keep it out of the wind.
Related Reading
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