Who bought Chinese chestnut trees from starkbro?
I bought three six years ago. My chestnut tree is full of flowers, but almost no leaves. My buddies said their chestnut trees’ leaves and flowers come together. Now I doubt if my tree is chestnut tree.
Had been flowers for three years, but I didn’t see a single nut.
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Now i am pretty sure that Starkbro sent three oak trees. I tried a lot of energy and fertilizer to take care of three oak trees.
CHINKAPIN OAK
My Chinese chestnut trees:
Can I sue for starkbro?
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The leaves of the oak and chestnut you mentioned do look very similar. But the chestnut leaf appears to have sharper needle-like points around the leaves. Does your mature dark green leaves have this needle-like points around it?
Your first three photos are oaks.
Definitely oaks…I love oaks, but I’d be bummed if I’d spent 6 years babying them, expecting chestnuts for a lifetime. I’d certainly be contacting Stark to express my dissatisfaction, but don’t expect much more from them other than ‘Sorry’; or maybe an offer to provide replacement chestnut trees.
Sawtooth oak leaves could certainly be ‘mistaken’ for chestnut, if you’re not familiar with trees… and I’ve seen other posts where nurseries sold folks sawtooth oaks as chestnuts, and they grew them, unsuspectingly, until they started producing acorns. While chinkapin oak and chestnut oak are in the ‘chestnut-leafed’ group of the white oak family, their leaves really don’t look all that much like chestnut leaves to me.
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Thanks for posting. I’ll be taking a close look this spring at the “Chinese chestnut” trees I got from stark three years ago.
4 or 5 years ago I noticed that a photo that Stark had for one of their chestnut trees was wrong. I wrote them to let them know. They never responded and never corrected it.
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Castanea,
What are you thought about growing out those giant chestnut from the Asian market. Do you think the seedling will be hardy enough for Z5?
Tony
Last year, -24 Celcius killed my chestnut tree. I bought two grafted chestnut trees before starkbro oak trees. Only one sucker survived. I grafted two new varieties on it, but died back last year.
So if you have minus 20celcius at your location, you should protect them through the winter.
FWIW, I bought two Chinese chestnuts labeled Qing from Stark in 2015. I believe that these are seedlings with Qing parentage, not grafted clones. Anyway, the trees are definitely chestnuts: I’ve seen leaves, flowers, and – ta da! – fruit. The two trees behave slightly differently – one flowers slightly later than the other. I assume that the two trees fertilize each other because both trees bore small crops 2 years ago and decent crops last year. I can’t be absolutely sure, however, as there is another large chestnut of unknown provenance in a neighbor’s yard roughly 200 yards away.
p.s. The flowers on my trees are very similar to those in Post #5.
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Hi Tony,
Those big ones are Japanese and they probably will not be cold hardy in many parts of zone 5.
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