Sticky buds

A, T, H & R's great-great-grandmother always took a couple of horse chestnut twigs with her back to London after she came to stay in the Spring in the 1980s so she could watch the bud burst over the following weeks.  When she first moved to New Malden around 1920 there were rolling fields all around: sixty years later and  you had to travel miles further out to see the same thing