Big Euro (Castanea sp.)

Complexe hybride waarvan ouders niet met zekerheid gekend zijn. Vermoedelijk 50% Chinese/mollissima en 50% hybride met Japanse, Europese en Amerikaanse kastanje. Door hoge aandeel Chinese kastanje zeer sterk tegen phytopthora maar best traag en bij lagere temperatuur garen voor smaak.

So Big Euro may be (Japanese/European x European/American) x Chinese. No one has yet tried to graft this Big Euro tree but it may be a challenge. While many complex hybrids seem to develop grafting plasticity (they will graft onto anything) some are very difficult to graft. With a tree like this one, even if you could get a take on Chinese stock, it would quickly overgrow the stock. "Big Euro" burs. This is a complex hybrid. The mother tree was a European/Japanese seedling from a 100 year old cultivar orchard in Brownsville, California. The pollen parent was a very vigorous Chinese seedling. Big Euro is extremely vigorous and grew to about 15 feet tall before developing any lateral branches at all. It is an extreme timber-type tree. It produces a heavy crop of nuts. The nuts are large to very large, and peel well, but they have a bland taste. Still, this should be an excellent tree for breeding work. Since it is half Chinese and probably about 1/4 Japanese, it might be blight resistant. It is definitely resistant to phytophthora. "Big Euro" nuts. This is a Sativa/crenata x mollissima hybrid. The tree is extremely vigorous and grows like a pure sativa tree although it is 1/2 Chinese. Nut production is heavy. Even though I knew this tree is half Chinese, I have always thought of it as European or European/Japanese because it grows like a European tree and the nuts have European/Japanese size. So I have always cooked these like a European nut, cut the shell and roasted the nuts in the oven at high temps. That did not bring out much flavor in these nuts. This year I roasted them low and slow and did not cut the shells. Much better. It's a very tasty nut when cooked slowly. 191 grams for all 5 nuts. 11.88 per lb. I planted a nut from a tree I call Big Early in the 1990s. Big Early is a 100 year old tree in the cultivar planting at Brownsville, California. Big Early appears to be a Japanese/European hybrid, although it seems to be much more Japanese than European. The pollen parent for the Big Early nut I planted is unknown but we can make some educated guesses. The Big Early tree is growing in a section of the orchard where it is surrounded by Colossal (which luckily does not produce pollen) and by American hybrids such as Paragon. The American hybrids seem to be American/European hybrids but they all seem to be much more American than European. There are other areas of the orchard where there are American/European hybrids that are more European than American. The seedling that resulted from the Big Early nut that I planted was an erect grower with timber type attributes, very vigorous, and produced large Japanese type nuts at about 3 years old. That seedling was growing in a large raised planter bed. Even so, it died of phytophthora. The next season a nut under the dead tree sprouted and started growing. It was not growing in the raised planter bed but in the native soil the planter bed rested upon. I paid little attention to it and assumed it would also die of phytopthora. It did not die. It was extremely vigorous and showed extreme timber type growth even though the leaves looked somewhat Chinese. It eventually produced nuts which were huge and peeled well. The vigor of the tree is astonishing, more vigorous than any American tree I have grown, and more vigorous than most if not all European trees I have grown. This is all the more amazing because my soil is very bad and poorly drained with a pH in the 6.5-6.9 range. (If I had ever asked anyone whether I should grow chestnuts in this soil they would have told me "no". Good thing I never asked.) It seems pretty clear that this seedling, which I started calling Big Euro for it's European type growth habit and general look, had been pollenized by a timber type Chinese seedling that was growing next to Big Euro. The Chinese seedling grew out of a nut I obtained in Yixian China in 1993 and imported under USDA permit. I have no information about that particular Yixian nut, but Yixian is the center of a major chestnut growing region in Anhui province, about 225 miles SW of Nanjing China. Most of the seedlings I have grown out from Yixian have been memorable in one respect or another. So Big Euro's lineage may be as follows- [C. crenata/sativa x dentata/sativa] x C. mollissima. My guess is that the tree is roughly - 15-20% Japanese, 15-20% American, 10-20% European and 50% Chinese. So basically this tree has retained its Japanese sized nuts, the vigor of the European and American parents, and the easy peeling nuts of the Chinese parent, while keeping the phytophthora resistance of the Chinese parent. Big Euro is clearly very resistant to phytophthora. I am speculating that it might also exhibit a similar resistance to chestnut blight. Despite its phenomenal growth habit, heavy productivity, and large easy peeling nuts, I have been dismissive of this tree for years because the nuts were somewhat boring to eat. But I had been cooking the nuts as if they were European nuts (higher temperatures for shorter periods of time) which resulted in the nuts being incompletely cooked. Within the last couple of years I have cooked the nuts at lower temperatures for longer periods of time, like Chinese nuts should be cooked, and that has brought out more flavor and better texture. The result is that I have finally come to accept the fact that this is an amazing tree. I just hope that grafting it is going to be workable for those in the eastern US. It looks like European/Japanese hybrids may be workable stock. Seedlings of Marigoule, which seems to be European/Japanese/Chinese, may be good stock. Szego seedlings might be workable stock. Grafts on Gillet and Szego should work because James has grafted Gillet and Szego on the original Big Euro tree.

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