Results of Experiments on Chestnut Cultivars for Wood Production

During 12 years research has been done on growth, architectural traits and cultivation techniques of some cultivars (“Cardaccio”, “Mozza”, “Politora”, “Perticaccio” and “Mondistollo”) traditionally cultivated in Central Italy for they high timber quality. These cultivars offer a further opportunity to improve the quality of chestnut wood production both establishing stand specifically managed for high quality timber production and to enrich thin stand to improve, in quality and in quantity, chestnut forest wood production where the stand density allows. They come out as an additional option to those ones offered by the silvicultural system studied to manage more rationally coppice stands. Research was carried out in two areas, in Lucca and Bologna provinces, in order to test the cultivar both in traditional cultivation areas and in another different environment. The cultivars showed different growth rates and a specific architectural development.