This article is about the chestnut plant in the genus Castanea. The name horse-chestnut is commonly applied to several species in the unrelated genusAesculus(family Sapindaceae). Chestnut is also used to describe a certain colour of coat in horses that resembles the colour of the chestnut nut.
C. alnifolia - Bush Chinkapin* C. crenata - Japanese Chestnut C. dentata - American Chestnut C. henryi - Henry's Chestnut C. mollissima - Chinese Chestnut C. ozarkensis - Ozark Chinkapin C. pumila - Alleghany Chinkapin C. sativa - Sweet Chestnut C. seguinii - Seguin's Chestnut * treated as a synonym of C. pumila by many authors
Chestnuts (Castanea), including the chinkapins, are a genus of eight or nine species of trees and shrubs in the beech family Fagaceae, native to warm temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The name also refers to the nuts produced by these trees. Most are large trees to 20-40 m tall, but some species (the chinkapins) are smaller, often shrubby. All are deciduous.
Sweet Chestnut cupule with nuts
The leaves are simple, ovate or lanceolate, 10-30 cm long and 4-10 cm broad, with sharply pointed, widely-spaced teeth, with shallow rounded sinuses between. The flowers are catkins, produced in mid summer. The fruit is a spiny cupule 5-11 cm diameter, containing 2-7 nuts.
The American Chestnut, formerly one of the dominant trees of the eastern United States, has been almost wiped out by a fungal diesase, chestnut blightCryphonectria parasitica. The American chinkapins are also very susceptible to chestnut blight. The European and west AsianSweet Chestnut is slightly susceptible, but less so than the American, and the east Asian species are resistant. These resistant species, particularly Japanese Chestnut and Chinese Chestnut but also Seguin's Chestnut and Henry's Chestnut, have been used in breeding programs in the US to create hybrids with the American chestnut that are also disease resistant.
Uses
The nuts are commonly eaten roasted or candied; the latter are often sold under the French name marrons glacés. The wood is moderately useful, similar to oak wood in being decorative and very durable, but of much value due to the high degree of splitting and warping when it dries. This makes large pieces of wood difficult to obtain; most chestnut wood is used in small items where the durability is important, such as fencing and wooden outdoor cladding ('shingles') for buildings. The bark was also a useful source of natural tannins, used for tanning leather before the introduction of synthetic tannins.
The HorseChestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum, which has also been known as Hippocastanum vulgare (Gaertn.), is an entirely different tree from the Sweet Chestnut, to which it is not even distantly related, and is of much more recent importation to English soil.
The fruit is a brown nut, with a very shining, polished skin, showing a dull, rough, pale-brown scar where it has been attached to the inside of the seed-vessel, a large green husk, protected with short spines, which splits into three valves when it falls to the ground and frees the nut.
It is concluded that HorseChestnuts are not poisonous to any of the farm animals experimented with, within the limits of what they can be induced to eat, and that they form a highly nutritious food.
CHESTNUT (nux Castanea), the common name given to two sorts of trees and their fruit, (r) the so-called "horse-chestnut," and (2) the sweet or "Spanish" chestnut.
Chestnuts (the fruit of the tree) are extensively imported into Great Britain, and are eaten roasted or boiled, and mashed or otherwise as a vegetable.
The trees are very abundant in the south of Europe, and chestnuts bulk largely in the food resources of the poor in Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Germany.
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