44 FAMILIAR TREES 
twisted trunks recalling bits of Spain, or of Salvator 
Rosa’s Calabrian landscape. In-the immediate neigh- 
bourhood of the metropolis there are no specimens 
to surpass the fine trees in Kensington and Kew 
Gardens. 
Turner, in his “Names of Herbes” (1548), 
writes:—“ Nux castanea is called in Greeke 
Castanon, in Englishe a chestnut-tree, in, Duch 
Castene, in French Ung Chastagne. Chesnuttes 
growe in diverse places of Englande. The maniest 
that I have sene was in Kent.” From Shake- 
speare’s allusions to it in Macbeth and the Zam- 
ing of the Shrew, it would seem to have been 
a common article of food in his time. . 
Below the rounded, slightly-pointed buds in 
spring may be seen the projecting bracket-like 
scars which supported the heavy leaves of the 
previous year. The bark of the young saplings, 
and of the pollard shoots that are grown for Hop- 
poles in the South-east of England, is smooth 
and of a rich vinous maroon or red-brown tint; 
but in older trees it becomes: grey, and. splits 
in vertical lines so as to allow of the expansion 
of the wood within. These vertical cracks widen, 
deepen, and sometimes, as the trees grow, become 
twisted, thus often giving to the full-grown Chest- 
nut stem a most distinctive rope-cable-like ap- 
pearance. The tree attains a height of fifty, 
eighty, or even one hundred feet, and single 
stems may no doubt exceed twenty feet in 
girth, The branches are given off alternately and 
nearly horizontally, but, spreading~ outwards, bend 
