Schlarbaum

‘Schlarbaum’ (C. crenata × C. mollissima) is a M. Nave selection. The tree is tall, slender, and drops nuts mid-season. During the late 1990s or early 2000, Dr. Schlarbaum of the University of Tennessee grafted Japanese chestnut trees at the experimental station in Byron, GA. M. Nave collected and evaluated large seeds from these C. crenata grafts, and ‘Schlarbaum’ is a selection from that seedlot. The pollen parent was probably a neighboring C. mollissima tree with a large nut, and experts suspect that tree may be the cultivar Shandong (Byron 4-2). ‘Shandong’ had very large nuts (the second-largest nuts at Byron). ‘Schlarbaum’ has few male flowers that are mostly sterile, but its productivity is just average. Its nuts are very large, with an easily removable pellicle (Anagnostakis and Nave, 2015; Miller, 2017). ‘Scharlbaum’ ramets were introduced to the UMCA repository in 2020.