American Chestnut Castanea dentata
American Chestnut is a perennial tree native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 115 ft and blooms Jun in part shade – shade, with brown fruit. A host for pollen-specialist native bees.
More about this plant
The American chestnut is a large, fast-growing deciduous tree of the beech family native to eastern North America. As is true of all species in the genus Castanea, the American chestnut produces burred fruit with edible nuts. The American chestnut was once common in the Appalachian Mountain range and was a dominant species in the oak-chestnut forest region of its central and southern range. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Part shade – shade
- Soil & moisture
- Medium moisture
- Soil pH
- 5.5–6.5
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Medium (loam)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 4+
- Drought tolerance
- Moderate
- Shade tolerance
- Moderate
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 115 ft
- Mature width
- ~ 69 ft wide DERIVED derived estimate — open-grown crown allometry (height × growth-form ratio); not a measurement
- Spacing
- 12–16 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · long-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · coarse texture
- Active growth
- Spring
- Fruit
- Brown persists into winter
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- Needs cold stratification a cold-moist spell before it germinates
- Seeds ripen
- Summer – Autumn seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Field collection only
- Deer browsing
- Low often deer-resistant
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~127 caterpillar species
Castanea supports ~127 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is an exceptional genus.
Recorded feeding on Castanea in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees specialist-bee host · 13 bee visitors
Specialist native bees depend on it.
Some native bees are pollen specialists (oligolectic) — they raise young only on pollen from particular plant genera. Castanea is a recorded specialist-bee host, so losing it can mean losing the bee that relies on it.
13 native & managed bee species are documented visiting American Chestnut — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 3 nectaring
Open records of who else uses American Chestnut — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
3 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers:
Across 394 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded American Chestnut, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Castanea →
How we know this (4) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
For woody plants that have a height but no measured crown, we estimate width = height × a crown-to-height ratio fit for that plant’s form (conifers narrower than broadleaf trees, shrubs widest), calibrated on our measured open-grown crowns and capped at the largest one ever measured. A measured crown always wins; herbaceous plants get nothing (no anchor).
Honest limits: A coarse class-median estimate for garden-scale spacing, not a measurement; woody single/multi-stem forms only.
Sources for this entry (39) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
Loading…
BibTeX
Loading…