Castanea pumila(L.) Mill.

Allegheny chinquapinchinkapinchinquapin

WFO wfo-0000812123 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Castanea pumila, photographed by Nonbinary-Naturalist
fig. a Nonbinary-Naturalist, CC0 1.0 / 2022-05-18 / obs. 200266601
Castanea pumila, photographed by Hill Craddock
fig. b Hill Craddock, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195823205
Castanea pumila, photographed by Morgan Freese
fig. c Morgan Freese, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194107428
Castanea pumila, photographed by Morgan Freese
fig. d Morgan Freese, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 194106529
Castanea pumila, photographed by Michelle W. （鍾偉瑋）
fig. e Michelle W. （鍾偉瑋）, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 186528891
Castanea pumila, photographed by Ryan Watson
fig. f Ryan Watson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 185098519
Castanea pumila, photographed by Michael J. Papay
fig. g Michael J. Papay, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 164200496
Castanea pumila, photographed by Harold Smith
fig. h Harold Smith, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 154792432

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 22 botanical countries

Regions where Castanea pumila is native: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia AlabamaArkansasFloridaGeorgiaIndianaKentuckyLouisianaMarylandMassachusettsMississippiMissouriNew JerseyNew YorkNorth CarolinaOklahomaPennsylvaniaSouth CarolinaTennesseeTexasVirginiaWest Virginia Delaware
Native distribution of Castanea pumila, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
Alabama ALA NORTHERN AMERICA
Arkansas ARK
Delaware DEL
Florida FLA
Georgia GEO
Indiana INI
Kentucky KTY
Louisiana LOU
Maryland MRY
Massachusetts MAS
Mississippi MSI
Missouri MSO
New Jersey NWJ
New York NWY
North Carolina NCA
Oklahoma OKL
Pennsylvania PEN
South Carolina SCA
Tennessee TEN
Texas TEX
Virginia VRG
West Virginia WVA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 195 in flower of 1,162 examined

Peak flowering in Jun. Each bar is the share of Castanea pumila observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 195 of 1,162 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,931 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -4.4 °C 0.4 °C 8.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 25.6 °C 30.6 °C 33.5 °C
Annual rainfall 1,065 mm 1,330 mm 1,758 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 210 mm 262 mm 373 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,931 research-grade observations of Castanea pumila that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 24 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Castanea alnifolia Nutt.
  • Castanea alnifolia subsp. floridana (Sarg.) A.E.Murray
  • Castanea alnifolia var. floridana Sarg.
  • Castanea alnifolia var. pubescens Nutt.
  • Castanea ashei (Sudw.) Sudw. ex Ashe
  • Castanea chincapin hort. ex K.Koch
  • Castanea floridana (Sarg.) Ashe
  • Castanea floridana var. angustifolia (Ashe) Ashe
  • Castanea floridana var. arcuata (Ashe) Ashe
  • Castanea floridana var. margaretta (Ashe) Ashe
  • Castanea floridana var. margarettae (Ashe) Ashe
  • Castanea margaretta (Ashe) Ashe
  • Castanea margaretta var. angustifolia Ashe
  • Castanea margaretta var. arcuata Ashe
  • Castanea nana Muhl.
  • Castanea paucispina Ashe
  • Castanea pumila subsp. ashei (Sudw.) A.E.Murray
  • Castanea pumila var. ashei Sudw.
  • Castanea pumila var. margarettae Ashe
  • Castanea pumila var. nana (Elliott) A.DC.
  • Castanea pumila var. pumila
  • Fagus nana Du Roi ex Steud.
  • Fagus pumila L.
  • Fagus pumila var. serotina Walter

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.