Chestnuts

On our walk yesterday we picked up several chestnuts; on the left Horse Chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum (or Conkers) and, on the right, Sweet (or Spanish) Chestnut, Castanea sativa.

It is often assumed that, being morphologically similar, these are closely related but in fact they are from two quite separate families, Hippocastanaceae and Fagaceae respectively; thus the latter is more closely related to the Beech.