Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops. Vol. 1

112 S. Pereira-Lorenzo and A. M. Ramos-Cabrer
Table 4. Main characteristics to distinguish between principal chestnut species (Camus, 1929; UPOV,
1988; Bourgeois, 1992).
Species Maximum Shoots Buds Leaves Fruit
height
C. sativa 35 m Thick, angular, Thick, Big (10 to Burs in the
reddish, more ovoid, hairy, 20 cm × 5 to end of the
or less hairy phyllotaxy 8 cm), strongly shoots
2/5 dentate, dark
green
C. crenata 20 m Thin, round, Small, Smaller and Burs in the
brownish-red ovoid, narrower (9 medium part
and brightly pointed, to 15 cm × 3 of the shoot.
no hairy, to 3.5 cm), Broad hilum,
phyllotaxy mucronate 1/4 of the
1/5 fruit. Bearing
at the third
year.
C. mollisima 15 m Thin, brown Small, near Long, oval Small nuts,
or grey, ovoid, hairy, (15 to 20 cm thin and long
slightly hairy phyllotaxy × 5 to 7 cm), style
1/5 slightly dentate
C. dentata 35 m Thin, slightly Small, Big, narrow
angular, near ovoid, (15 to 20 cm ×
greenish-yellow, punted, 4.5 to 5.5 cm)
yellowish-red, no hairy
no hairy
mucronate leaf of the Japanese type can distinguish from the Chinese and European
species. Interspecific hybrids show intermediate characteristic, which make identification
difficult.
Largest nuts come from C. sativa, variable sizes in C. crenata, medium in C.
mollissima and small in C. dentata (Vossen, 2000). Best flavour is found in the
American, Chinese and European chestnuts.
In a study of C. sativa cultivars of Northwestern Spain, Pereira-Lorenzo et al.
(1996c) the variability of the main morphological parameters defined by the UPOV
(1988) were used to distinguish chestnut cultivars (Table 5).
Male catkins varied in length between 4.5 and 42 cm, the average being 18 cm
(Table 5, Figure 2). In Spanish cultivars, the most frequent type is longistaminate
(44.9%), followed by mesostaminate (35.3%), brachystaminate (12.2%) and astaminate
(7.6%) (Pereira-Lorenzo, unpublished).
Male-sterility has been suggested to be related to heavy fruit bearers (Breviglieri,
1955; Miller et al., 1996), but this is not always the case, since some of the best
Spanish cultivars are longistaminate such as Pilonga, Temprana and Planta Alajar
in Andalucía (Pereira-Lorenzo and Ramos-Cabrer, 2002).
Leaves length varies between 6.2 to 26.8 cm (15.0 cm on average) and the