In Asia Minor the chestnut has been found wild in northern and western Anatolia; but it appears to be absent from the Taurus and Lebanon. In the Caucasus! it is found throughout the whole territory, and also in the Talysch, up to 6000 feet elevation ; and it extends into north Persia.
A large chestnut grew in Madeira, on the estate of Count Carvalhal, at Achada, 23 kilometres from Funchal, and was reported by M. Joly’? to have been about 160 feet in height with a girth at 3 feet 4 inches from the ground of 38 feet 8 inches. It was burnt down three years ago, and no trace of it now exists. The chestnut is not indigenous*® in Madeira, although formerly many large planted woods existed there, most of which have disappeared.
The chestnut was probably introduced into England by the Romans, Charcoal, supposed to be of chestnut, was discovered by Mr. H.N. Ridley * associated with palzolithic implements and the bones of the rhinoceros in a brick-earth pit between Erith and Crayford in Kent. Mr. Clement Reid’ has not found any evidence corroborating the possibility of the tree being a native of Britain in prehistoric times, and Mr. Ridley’s specimen may be capable of some other explanation.
The tree® is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon literature as the césten or cyst-beam. The modern name chestnut is a shortened form of chesten-nut, the fruit of the chesten, the early English name of the tree, representing the old French chastaigne, from the Latin castanea. King Henry II., in a grant to the Abbey of Flaxley in the Forest of Dean, says:" ‘de cadem foresta dedi eis decimam castanearum mearum” ; and it is probable that the chestnuts here referred to were cultivated at this early time for their fruit and not for their timber.
Natural seedlings* are common in the southern counties, as in Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire; and the chestnut may be considered to be naturalised in some places. Briggs states that it is naturalised in Cotehele wood near Plymouth ; but as Bromfield remarks, it does not spread over waste places in the way that oak and pine commonly do. (A.H.)
Cultivation
The Sweet or Spanish Chestnut, as it is usually called, is on soils and situations which suit it one of the largest trees in England, and both from an ornamental and an economic point of view one of the most important of exotic hard-woods.
It is most at home in the southern counties, for though hardy in almost any part of Great Britain, it loves a warm soil and a warm summer climate, but will grow to a large size where the rainfall is as much as 60 inches per annum.
1 Radde, Pfhlanzenverbrett, Kaukasuslind, 182 (1899).
2 Note sur un Chataignier Colossal.
3 Cf, Vahl, in Engler, Bot. Jahrb. 1905, p. 307.
4 Journ. Bot. 1885, p. 253.
5 Origin British Flora, 146 (1899).
6 Cf. Murray, New English Dictionary, ii, 329 (1893). The village of Cheshunt does not take its name, as has been supposed by Ducarel and others, from the chestnut. Skeat, in Place Names of Hertfordshire, 37 (1904), proves that Cheshunt is a corruption of Cestrehunt, derived from Anglo-Saxon ceaster, a camp, and hunta, a huntsman
7 Ducarel, in Phil. Trans. 1771.
8 There are numerous natural seedlings in Windsor Park, especially amongst the tall pines near Virginia Water. They are also common in Norfolk, at Fulmodestone and at Hargham.
