Ohio buckeye (Aesculus glabra): what the agencies record

This page reports what US federal publications say about one tree. It does not identify trees from descriptions or photos and does not say what should be done with any tree. The family overview, tree species in the agency records, explains the sources and holds the comparison table. A related tree from Europe is described on the horse chestnut canker page and the horse chestnut leaf miner page.

At a glance

Item	What the source records
Scientific name	Aesculus glabra Willd., horsechestnut family (Silvics and PLANTS)
Other names, Silvics	American buckeye, fetid buckeye and stinking buckeye, from the odor of crushed leaves
Native status, USDA PLANTS	Native in Canada and the lower 48 states
Size, Silvics	Generally not taller than 9.1 m (30 ft) and seldom over 21.3 m (70 ft); the largest living tree registered in 1978 was 116 cm (45.5 in) in diameter and 44.5 m (146 ft) tall; trees over 61 cm (24 in) in diameter are rare
Weight table	Not published for Ohio buckeye: NRS-38 Table 1A and the Wood Handbook strength table (Table 5-3b) have no row for it

Native range and climate

The Silvics of North America handbook (Agriculture Handbook 654, Volume 2, 1990) says Ohio buckeye grows mostly on mesophytic sites, from western Pennsylvania, Ohio and southern Michigan west as far as Illinois and central Iowa. The range runs south to eastern Kansas, southwestern Oklahoma and central Texas, and east to western Arkansas, Tennessee and central Alabama, with one location in eastern Mississippi. It has been planted in Europe and in the eastern United States, including eastern Massachusetts, Minnesota and western Kansas. The handbook separates a western variety, Texas buckeye (var. arguta), a shrub or small tree ranging from southeastern Nebraska southwest to central Texas.

Silvics gives average minimum temperatures not below minus 29 degrees C (minus 20 degrees F) within the range, with minus 40 degrees recorded where it grows in Missouri and Iowa, and a maximum of 46 degrees C (115 degrees F) in the west. Average annual precipitation runs from 760 mm (30 in) in Kansas and Oklahoma to 1,020 mm (40 in) in Ohio and western Pennsylvania and up to 1,400 mm (55 in) in Mississippi and Alabama. The frost-free season is about 160 days in the northern part of the range and up to 220 days in the southern part.

Sites and forest cover

The handbook calls the buckeye a moist-site tree, most often found along river bottoms and in streambank soils, mostly on Alfisols. On drier sites, in oak-hickory stands and on clayey soils, it usually grows slowly and seldom dominates; in eastern Oklahoma oak-hickory stands it stays a shrub of 1.2 to 1.5 m (4 to 5 ft). Silvics reports it in mixed stands in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky with bur oak, chinkapin oak, white ash, hackberry, sugar maple, black walnut, black cherry, honeylocust, Kentucky coffeetree, shagbark hickory, American elm and red mulberry. It says the Society of American Foresters lists Ohio buckeye as a component of no North American forest cover type, probably because of its minor commercial importance and increasing rarity, and that it is not a pioneer tree and is seldom found on old fields or spoil banks.

Flowers, seed and growth

The handbook describes the tree as polygamo-monoecious, bearing bisexual and male flowers together. The pale greenish-yellow flowers appear after the leaves from March to May in upright branched clusters, and only those near the base of a cluster are fertile. The fruit is a leathery capsule holding one, two or three dark chocolate to chestnut brown seeds with a large light-colored hilum, which makes the seed look like an eye. Seeds are dispersed from early September to late October by gravity, animals and sometimes water; the tree begins bearing seed at 8 years. Germination is hypogeal, and Silvics reports no germination on dry surface soil. It says the tree generally develops a strong taproot the first year, grows faster as a sapling than most oaks but slower than yellow-poplar, and is characteristically branchy with a short, knotty trunk in the open. On good sites it reaches usable sawtimber size at 60 to 80 years.

Because the buckeye is often found in beech and sugar maple stands, the handbook classes it as shade tolerant, and says it attains good form as a timber tree only in reasonably dense stands.

Wood and the poisonous parts

The Wood Handbook (FPL-GTR-282, 2021) treats yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava) and Ohio buckeye together. It says the white sapwood grades into creamy or yellowish-white heartwood, and describes the wood as even in texture, mostly straight in grain, light, soft and weak against shock, with a low machinability rating for shaping, mortising, boring and turning. It says buckeye lumber is not usually kept apart from other species and suits the uses of aspen, basswood and the sapwood of yellow-poplar. Silvics adds pulpwood and woodenware.

Silvics reports that the bark and seeds contain a narcotic glucoside considered poisonous to livestock, that young shoots are poisonous to cattle, and that landowners in Indiana have exterminated buckeye in many areas for that reason. It also records that eastern fox squirrels eat some buckeye seed, from 2 to 5 percent of their food in fall, winter and spring in Ohio.

Damaging agents the handbook names

Silvics calls Ohio buckeye relatively free of insect pests and with relatively few diseases. It names the sapwood timberworm, a lacebug, a leaf beetle and the walnut scale as feeders. The diseases it names are a leaf blotch (Guignardia aesculi), a powdery mildew, and a leaf rust in the western part of the range; it says leaf blotch and leaf scorch (a reaction to heat and drought on city streets) may rank as the most serious, and that air pollution may be more responsible for leaf blighting than heat or drought. Fungi that can rot the central stem or wounds include Ganoderma applanatum, Oxyporus populinus, Phellinus johnsonianus and Polyporus squamosus, and the handbook says buckeye in forest stands is usually free of decay defect unless fire has damaged the bole. Early leaves are sometimes killed by frost, but the tree withstands severe winters and is not susceptible to sunscald.

For who takes reports of regulated pests, see reporting a pest in the United States, and pests and diseases by country sets out which ones agencies regulate.