This will be the last word about oaks for some time. Oak lovers are like cat lovers or dog lovers, they can't stop talking about their pets and love to swap stories with others of the same ilk. Frank King of Virginia writes to say that "when in St Petersburg in August last year, I spent an afternoon looking for Dostoyevsky's grave. Located beside it was a very mature Russian oak from which I was lucky enough to collect 50 very big healthy acorns. Back home I cared for them throughout the winter, storing them in the utility in used milk cartons tilled with moist clay. By early June/ end of May, all but six have sprouted and he offers some of the best to Y, who had given him acorns a long time ago.
He has already begun distribution of others, and anxiously hopes the drumlin country of North Leitrim, where one has gone, will be as hospitable to the tender plant as St Petersburg would be. He keeps for himself one at the sink in the kitchen window, which he names Raskolnikov "after the impoverished student in Crime and Punishment".
Not all goes smoothly for such a collector. "In November 92 I got nine acorns in the grounds of a school for the deaf in Bremen, North Germany. Of these, eight grew well in pots but after I planted them out in November 1995 (at about 16-15 inches each), two or three of them have not leafed this spring. They still look healthy but bad frost here in April and May may have destroyed them." Pity. But second year American oaks, with foliage thriving in early June were blasted by frost and haven't recovered. And that not far from Virginia.
To another tree. The horse chestnut. It was written here that this tree aesculus hippocastanum, is originally from Asia Minor where, experts have written, the nuts were used as medicine for ailing horses, though, it is said, no horses here will touch them. Now John Harrington, personnel manager of Klinge Pharma and Co of Killorglin, Kerry, writes that his company produces a drug from horse chest nuts to treat varicose vein symptoms. And they import the nuts from Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland. "The product is encapsulated/packed at our Munich HQ". See now, we haven't any chestnut forests.