Together with Renaissance of the Earth Teaching Fellow, Ellena Baum, participants in this workshop will explore how early moderns cultivated, tended, and imagined chestnut trees. As we celebrate the local chestnut harvest in Fall 2026, we will prepare and eat chestnuts under the canopy of a mature Chinese Chestnut tree at the Kinney Center. We will contemplate folktales and mythologies across European and Indigenous cultures that feature chestnuts, as we consider the prickly past of this staple crop and its possible futures using agroforestry farming practices.