Description
Chestnut species are all closely related and nut enthusiasts have carried out extensive hybridization in a quest for superior trees, selecting for productivity, nut size, flavor, disease-resistance, pest-resistance, tree architecture and easy-peeling nuts. Superior varieties are grafted, much like fruit trees. Unlike fruit trees, seedlings of superior chestnuts often exhibit many of the superior parental traits and, especially here in the Northeast, grow as quickly and produce just as well as the grafted parents. Moreover, delayed graft failure can be a problem in grafted trees. Seedlings are used extensively in commercial nut orchards throughout the Eastern United States, are less expensive and what we offer. There is a very slight chance that some seedlings of varieties with American or European parentage will not be fully blight resistant (‘Sleeping Giant’, perhaps ‘Jenny’, ‘Luvall’s Monster’, ‘FAN Hybrids’, ‘Twisted Tree Hybrids’ and ‘Wildlife Hybrids’ are the only seedlings we offer with at least partial American or European parentage). Also, some selected varieties are pollen sterile (there is a tradeoff between nut productivity and pollen sterility – trees selected for productivity are often pollen sterile) and pass that trait on to their seedlings (‘Luvall’s Monster’ is the only variety we offer known to be pollen sterile). Cross-pollination is necessary in chestnuts. While seedlings from a single superior variety may be genetically different enough to cross-pollinate each other (especially for genetically diverse seed strains like ‘Empire Elite’ ‘FAN Hybrids’, ‘Twisted Tree Hybrids’ and ‘Wildlife Hybrids’), for best results plant seedlings from two different varieties (for example, ‘Sleeping Giant’ and ‘Qing’). Only use seedlings from pollen-sterile varieties if you are planting an orchard with quite a few varieties in total – never if you want to plant just two trees.
Updated 4 February 2024
