1998

ARBORETUM AND FRUTICETUM.

PART III.

to the full action of the sun’s rays, on riddles, for seven or eight days. Theeffect of this will be to cause the fruit to shrink, and become somewhat fur-rowed ; but it will retain its vital properties for planting, as well as its agree-able flavour as an article of food, for a much longer period than if it had notbeen dried. The nuts of the American chestnut are commonly sent over to theBritish seedsmen in dried moss; but those of Spain and France , sent over forthe table, being generally smoked and kilndried, are seldom found to vegetate.Du Hamel directs the nuts intended to produce young plants to be germinatedin sand, and the point of the radicle to be pinched off before planting; becauseby these means the nuts are kept out of the ground till late in the spring, andare in less danger of being eaten by vermin than if they were sown earlier.Boutcher proves the seeds by throwing them into a tub of water, preservingthose which sink in dry sand till the beginning of March. He then sowsthem in drills 1 ft. 2 in. apart, and the nuts 6 in. asunder in the drill, coveringthem with soil to the depth of 3 in. Sang gives a covering of only 2 in. Thenursery culture of Boutcher consists in taking up the plants at the end of thefirst season, and replanting them in lines at 2 ft. 6 in. asunder, and at 1 ft. dis-tance in the line. Here they remain two years; after which, he again removesthem (shortening the taproots which they will have formed) into lines 4 ft.asunder, and 2 ft. distant in the line, where they are to continue 3 years;after which they may be transplanted to where they are finally to remain.The grafting of the chestnut, according to Du Hamel , is most successfulwhen performed in the flute manner. Knight ( Hurt. Trans., vol. i. p. 62.)found the chestnut succeed readily when grafted in almost any of the usualways ; and, when the scions are taken from bearing branches, the young treesafford blossoms the succeeding year. It has been said that the tree is propa-gated by grafting in some of the Devonshire nurseries; but we have ascer-tained that this is not the case either in the Exeter Nursery, or in any of thenurseries in the Isle of Jersey, where, as already observed, the chestnut ismuch esteemed for its fruit. In pruning the chestnut as a fruit tree, it mustbe borne in mind that the blossoms appear on the young wood of the currentyear, which is produced at the extremity of the preceding year’s shoots;and hence the necessity of keeping the head open, in order to givea greater surface for the annual production of young wood. In France , thechestnut is very apt to produce those large shoots of one season, calledgourmandcs, which are easily known on the chestnut, as on all other trees, bytheir vigour, and by their proceeding from the trunk or the principal branches,and never from the smaller branches. The usual remedy for this over-luxu-riance in the tree is to shorten or remove these branches; but Mr. D. Beaton,in the Gardener’s Magazine, vol. xiii. p. 203., has suggested a better mode; viz.allowing the gourmandes to exhaust themselves, and thus carry off the super-flous vigour of the tree, only cutting out all the buds which they form; inconsequence of which, the following year, the shoot becomes so weak as toadmit of its being cut out without incurring the risk of forcing the tree tothrow out other shoots of the same kind. Chestnut trees, whether grownfor fruit or timber, at a certain stage of their growth, Bose says, when theyare from 200 to 300 years old, begin to decay at top; their branches dyingback, and the leaves and fruit produced being much smaller than before.When this is the case, the whole of the branches forming the head are cut into within 2 ft. or 3 ft. of the trunk, which invigorates the tree for a consider-able period, and occasions it to produce remarkably large fruit. After this,when the trunk of the tree has become hollow, and there is danger of itsbeing blown down by storms, it is pollarded, and in that state it forms a fineglobular head, and continues to produce fruit and faggot-wood for manyyears.

Felling the Chestnut . As timber, the chestnut can hardly be allowed tostand with safety for more than 50 or 60 years; and, even at that age, ontolerably good and somewhat moist soil, it will be found shaky within, andfit only for fuel. A more profitable time, probably, for felling it would be when