Funny, I looked those up yesterday, too! Here's what I came up with:

Pink Chestnut: Castanea dentata x mollissima ECOS American Hybrid Chestnut

Tree with fluffy pink dangling blossoms: Prunus serrulata 'Kwanzan' Kwanzan Cherry

So we agree on the cherry. As for the chestnut, my friend who bought it for me at the UT Plant Sale in 1999 (pretty sure it was 1999) told me that it was an American chestnut hybrid - that American chestnuts are prone to a blight, so growers are hybridizing them so they are resistant.

Personally, I'd almost rather it be a buckeye or horsechestnut (Gorgeous pics on gardenweb and other sites!), but now I NEED to know what it really is since, if it gets chestnuts, I will want to try to eat them (the ECOS hybrid is said to have tasty nuts) and buckeyes and horsechestnuts are poisonous, I read.

Anyone know how to tell the difference?

-Regina

Here's a coupla pages on ID --

http://www.extension.umn.edu/projects/yardandgarden/ygbriefs/h401chestnuts.html
http://www.westmorelandconservancy.org/amch/ChestnutComparison.html

I thought that a blight killed all the chestnuts 40-50 years ago.

Not quite.

In the early 1900's, blight did kill most of the *American* chestnuts. However, most of the Chinese and other chestnuts survived, and even some of the Americans did. There are at least two very large old chestnut trees in my immediate neighborhood (probably Chinese), and occasionally you can still find wild Americans in the forest. There is active breeding going on with some of the surviving American chestnuts to try to create a resistant strain, as well as the hybridizing that Regina mentioned.

There is a really big presumably American chestnut on the Gay Street side of the old courthouse in Knoxville. It flowers white and seems very healthy.

Ione, I will look at the IDing pages. Thanks!

-Regina

Regina -- the Gay Street chestnut is probably Chinese as well. It was very common to plant them early in the 1900's -- in fact, the Asian chestnuts are what brought the chestnut blight into this country in the first place. I talked to a dendrologist several years ago when I first found the chestnuts in my neighborhood, and she said she would be very surprised if they turned out to be American (I never got organized to send her leaves, so we never found out).

Ione,

I asked my friend who gave it to us and she said it is a horse chestnut. That jibes with the identification page you posted above. The wide leaflets on the compound leaves definitely fit the horse chestnut description. "Buckeye" is a different genus, with narrow leaflets in comparison to these. American chestnuts do not appear to have compound leaves at all, so that's out.

In reading up on Aesculus hippocastanum on the web, the variant that is a hybrid between A. hippocastanum and A. pavia is indeed the closest. AND it is indeed the Fort McNair!! Great ID job.

-Regina

I'm glad we got it figured out! :-)

My horse chestnut went to seed this week - one perfectly round, yellow-green hairy globe behind each bloom. In contrast, the red buckeye at the Trial Gardens (stunning tree!) was in the same seed phase, but had one oblong, yellow-green hairy buckeye behind each bloom.

We picked them all off because we can still reach them! I wish I could do that to that dreadful black walnut in the front yard... what a mess that thing makes.

Very interesting!

As for your black walnut -- gather the walnuts and sell them! Bring them to the swap! :-)

What would people want with my walnuts? The husks are gross - many years they are covered in maggots (ewwww) until the husks are gone, leaving just the nut. I toss 100 per day out into the street for a month each fall. I still end up with 20 new seedlings on the property each year, courtesy of the squirrels.

People actually eat these things? How do they prepare them? What do they taste like? The one time I tried to crack and eat a few I thought they tasted like walnuts soaked in wine. Ewwww.

Black walnuts are a very desirable nut -- they fetch a very high price per pound (one site has them at $12.99 per pound!). The problem, of course, is getting em out of their husks and shells. ;-)

Here's just a few links on black walnuts.

http://www.black-walnuts.com/
http://www.nutsonline.com/nuts/walnuts/black.html?source=gaw&kw=cam1grp41AdB
http://www.extension.umn.edu/projects/yardandgarden/ygbriefs/h404blkwal.html
http://www.ipm.iastate.edu/ipm/hortnews/1994/9-16-1994/bnut.html