Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Chestnut
Summary
The chestnuts are the deciduous trees and shrubs in the genus Castanea, in the beech family Fagaceae. They are native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere.
The name also refers to the edible nuts they produce.
The unrelated horse chestnuts (genus Aesculus) are not true chestnuts, but are named for producing nuts of similar appearance that are mildly poisonous to humans. True chestnuts should also not be confused with water chestnuts, which are tubers of an aquatic herbaceous plant in the sedge family Cyperaceae.
Other species commonly mistaken for chestnut trees are the chestnut oak (Quercus prinus) and the American beech (Fagus grandifolia), both of which are also in the Fagaceae family.
Brazil nuts, called "Brasil chestnuts" (castañas de Brasil in Spanish) or "chestnuts from Pará" (castanha-do-Pará in Portuguese) are also unrelated.
Chestnuts belong to the family Fagaceae, which also includes oaks and beeches. The four main species groups are commonly known as American, European, Chinese, and Japanese chestnuts.
The taxonomy of the American chestnuts is not completely resolved, particularly between the chinkapins (C. ozarkensis and C. pumila), which are sometimes considered to be the same species. There is also another chestnut, Castanea alabamensis, which may be its own species.
The name "chestnut" is derived from an earlier English term "chesten nut", which descends from the Old French word chastain (Modern French, châtaigne). The French word in turn derives from Latin Castanea (also the scientific name of the tree), which traces to the Ancient Greek word κάστανον (sweet chestnut). A possible source of the Greek word is the ancient town of Kastanea in Thessaly. The town probably took its name, though, from the trees growing around it. In the Mediterranean climate zone, chestnut trees are rarer in Greece because the chalky soil is not conducive to the tree's growth. Kastania is located on one of the relatively few sedimentary or siliceous outcrops. They grow so abundantly there that their presence would have determined the place's name.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.