Chestnut

Also called: sweet chestnut, horse chestnut, castanea

Chestnut, as the term is used in building and cabinet work, means sweet or Spanish chestnut, not the unrelated horse chestnut, which Hasluck (1907) dismissed as "a whitish wood of but little use." It is a moderately light, moderately strong hardwood that once framed and fitted a great deal of everyday work, and is now hard to find.

Character and ageing

Sweet chestnut carries only a small proportion of sapwood, the pale outer wood of a growing tree, distinctly smaller than the proportion found in oak, and smaller again than the proportion found in fir, though Tredgold (1871) noted that the proportion varies with the site and soil a tree grew in. Tredgold rated young chestnut wood as more durable even than oak, and put this down to its low sapwood content. With age the wood takes on a more cinnamon-toned colour, carries less sapwood, and closes to a tighter grain, while staying softer and lighter than oak. Like oak and ash, chestnut is a ring-porous wood: its largest pores cluster in the earlywood, the fast-grown wood laid down early in the growing season, which gives the timber an uneven, figured grain.

Working

Sawing and planing chestnut is fairly hard going, though it handles well afterward with either machine or hand tools. Its open grain needs filling before varnishing, with a grain filler, a paste worked into the pores before the finish goes on, and it is grouped with oak and ash among the coarse-grained woods that need a heavier filler than finer timbers take. Sweet chestnut is also grouped with oak, afromosia, camphorwood and Douglas fir as woods that show a strong reaction in use, unlike the mahogany family, which reacts only slightly and causes minor staining; the cause of the stronger reaction is not recorded.

Uses and status

Historically chestnut supplied poles, railway ties, crates, boxes, shingles, caskets, furniture and corestock for veneer panels, the timber core faced with a thin decorative veneer, and a 1920s American trade list includes it among timbers suited to interior finish and trim, alongside pine and cypress. In British cabinet work it was much used for the interior fittings of bureaux and writing cases. It once served widely for building sills too, but Benson (1988) records it as now scarce almost to the point of extinction, unlike white oak, which by comparison is merely hard to find. An American source also records a chestnut blight dated to 1904, though the surrounding passage is too damaged to reproduce reliably.