Chinese chestnut
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Chinese chestnut ( Castanea mollissima ) |
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The Chinese chestnut ( Castanea mollissima ), also soft chestnut , is a species of the chestnut genus ( Castanea ) from the beech family (Fagaceae) native to China . It is grown in China as a nut and is the economically most important type of chestnut , ahead of the related European sweet chestnut.
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features
The Chinese chestnut is a tree up to 20 meters high , rarely it grows shrub-like . It usually reaches heights of 12 meters and then has a trunk diameter of 75 to 80 centimeters. The young twigs have short hairs, often with long, sticking hairs . The bark is gray, smooth in young trees, cracked with white stripes in older trees.
The petiole is one to two inches long. The leaf blade is elliptical to lanceolate, 10 to 22 inches long and 4.5 to 7.3 inches wide. At least on the larger nerves they are hairy on the underside, but mostly the entire underside is hairy. They have scale-shaped glands on the top. The leaf base is rounded to truncated, the leaf edge is roughly serrated, the tip of the leaf is pointed to pointed.
The male inflorescences are 10 to 20 centimeters long. The male flowers are 4.5 millimeters high, 4 millimeters wide, have a six-membered flower shell that is densely hairy on the outside and long hairy on the inside. It has 10 to 12 stamens , the bald filaments of which are 5 to 6 millimeters long. The anthers are 0.2 millimeters long and 0.1 millimeters wide, glabrous and open with longitudinal slits. The rudiment of the stamp is around 0.7 millimeters high.
The female flowers are 6 millimeters long and 2 millimeters wide and are two or three in a cupula . Two to three cupules sit at the base of otherwise male inflorescences. The ovary consists of four to seven compartments and has four to ten styles .
The fruit cup (cupula) is yellowish to brownish red, densely covered with hairy, branched spines. It is five to six inches high and four to eight inches wide. Usually two or three nut fruits are formed per fruit cup. They are two to three centimeters in diameter and wider than they are tall. They are round or elliptical and have a long tip that is hairy white. The parting scar of the nut is smaller than the width of the fruit. The embryo is very sweet and richer in protein than the sweet chestnut or the Japanese chestnut . Otherwise, the composition is the same as that of the sweet chestnut. The seed skin can easily be detached from the embryo and is also not partially ingrown.
The flowering time is April to June, the fruit ripening August to October.
The number of chromosomes is 2n = 24.
Distribution and locations
The Chinese chestnut is native to China and northern Korea, and is now also found in India and Taiwan.
It grows in subtropical, temperate continental and temperate oceanic regions with mild winters and warm summers. The precipitation is around 1000 mm per year, which falls mainly in summer. It occurs from latitude 41 ° 29 'north near the Korean border to latitude 18 ° 31' north on the island of Hainan. It occurs in Hebei, Shandong, the Yangtze Valley, Sichuan, Anhui, Jiangsu and Yunnan. It grows from 50 to 2800 m above sea level. It is frost hardy to -29 ° C, but sensitive to late frosts due to its early budding.
Their natural occurrences are mixed forests with bamboo , spit fir ( Cunninghamia lanceolata ) and other species.
The Chinese chestnut was planted as a replacement in the United States following the collapse of the native American chestnut populations of the chestnut crab. In Korea it was also grown earlier, but was replaced by the Japanese chestnut.
Diseases and Herbivores
Of all the chestnut species, the Chinese chestnut is the most resistant to chestnut crayfish , which is native to China, has been known here since 1913 and is widespread. There is also hypovirulence here . The Chinese chestnut is affected by cancer, but under normal conditions it heals without major damage.
The chestnut gall wasp ( Dryocosmus kuriphilus ) is the economically most important pest.
use
The use of the Chinese chestnut is similar to that of the sweet chestnut, whereby the wood plays a much smaller role. There are over 300 varieties and local ecotypes, around 50 of which are grown on a large scale. The cultivation takes place mostly in plantations. The yield can be up to 10 tons per hectare and year. The size of the fruit is between 75 and 330 nuts per kilogram. Large-fruited varieties range from 35 to 150 nuts per kilogram. In Hubei there are varieties adapted to the subtropical conditions that produce two harvests per year.
The chestnut harvest in China, the only significant growing country for the Chinese chestnut, was 850,000 tons in 2006, with a total global harvest of all chestnut species of around 1.17 million tons.
The Chinese chestnut was already used by humans 5000 to 6000 years ago. In the 1990s the cultivation was expanded immensely. Production rose from 29,000 tons in 1953 to 115,000 tons in 1990 and 247,000 tons in 1995. The cultivated area rose similarly from 106,000 hectares in 1962 to 284,000 hectares in 1982 and 667,000 hectares in 1998.
supporting documents
The article is mainly based on the following documents:
- Species entry in the Flora of China , Volume 4, p. 316. (Characteristics)
- Species description in the Flora of Taiwan, Volume 2, p. 53. (Characteristics)
- G. Bounous, DT Marinoni: Chestnut: Botany, Horticulture, and Utilization . Horticultural Reviews, Volume 31, John Wiley & Sons 2005, pp. 291-347 (esp. 300-302). ISBN 0-471-66694-7 (spread, diseases)
Individual evidence
- ^ Castanea mollissima at Tropicos.org. In: IPCN Chromosome Reports . Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis
- ↑ Rafaël Govaerts (ed.): Castanea - World Checklist of Selected Plant Families of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Last accessed on January 12, 2017.
- ^ Statistics of the FAO [1] (accessed June 17, 2008), main type after Henri Breisch: Châtaignes et marrons . Center technique interprofessionnel des fruits et légumes, Paris 1995, p. 12. ISBN 2-87911-050-5
- ^ L. Liu, JY Zhou: Some Considerations on Chestnut Development in the 21st Century in China . In: G. Salesses: Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Chestnut . Acta Horticulturae, Vol 494, 1999, pp 85-88. ISBN 90-6605-941-9
