138 WAYSIDE AND WOODLAND TREES. 
and discloses the two or three glossy brown nuts. The Chest- 
nut is in flower from May to July, and the nuts drop in October. 
They form an important article of food in South Europe, where 
they are produced in abundance, and there can be little doubt 
that the importers of the tree to this country believed it would 
prove equally valuable here. Evelyn had this in mind when he 
recommended the nut as “a lusty and masculine food for rustics 
at all times, and of better nourishment for husbandmen than 
cole and rusty bacon.” Well, there is plenty of Chestnut grown 
around Evelyn’s estate at Wootton to-day, but it is chiefly as 
coppice, to provide hop-poles, and hoops for barrels, for which 
purpose the long straight shoots are split in two. Grown as 
coppice, the Chestnut also provides fine cover for pheasants and 
other game. The trees begin to bear when about twenty-five 
years old, and from thence on to the fiftieth or sixtieth year the 
timber is at its best, but later it develops the defect known as 
“ ring shake,” and becomes of little use. That is probably why 
one meets with so many hollow wrecks of what were once noble 
Chestnuts. 
The young wood is covered with smooth brown bark, but later 
this becomes grey, and its surface splits into longitudinal fissures, 
which give a very distinctive character to the trunk. In older 
trees the fissures and the alternating ridges have a slight spiral 
twist, which gives the tree the appearance (shown in our third 
photo) of having been wrenched round by some mighty force. 
The average age of the Chestnut is about five hundred years, 
but there have been in this country many old trees that were 
much older, if any reliance could be placed in local tradition. 
There was — we fear there is little of it still remaining — the great 
Tortworth Chestnut in Lord Ducies’ park at Tortworth Court. 
In 1820 it was found to have a girth of fifty-two feet. Evelyn 
refers to it in his “ Sylva,” and tells us that in the reign of 
King Stephen it already bore the title of the Great Chestnut of 
Tortworth. 
