Luckily, Michael down the road has a glorious abundance of chestnuts, and has given us a bucket full. Chestnuts are easy to cook - roast for about 40 minutes, or microwave about 90 seconds, but do remember to slit their dark outer skin first, or you'll end up with burst chestnut all over then kitchen.

I usually boil chestnuts, even though that isn't as romantic and you lose the chestnut scent lingering through the house. Boiled chestnuts are easier to get out of their skins than roasted ones. Eat them plain, or with butter and salt, or fry them for a minute in olive oil with garlic ... at which point I'd better stop, because I'm salivating. Chestnuts are most fun though slit down their covering, then held on a metal spade over the coals until the nuts smell roasted and irresistible.

I never really understood chestnuts until I went to Europe. Chestnuts don't easily catch on in a climate where you don't just need a pair of woolly gloves to keep your hands warm in winter, but have to fill them with hot chestnuts that you slowly nibble as you walk along to ward off frostbite.

Here in Australia, most people don't bother with the fiddly process of slitting the skins and cooking them. Trust me - it's worth it.

There is no such thing as a dwarf chestnut tree. Chestnuts grow slowly, for about 50 years. In other words, you need space, which is often in short supply in home gardens. They also need good, deep soil.

On the other hand, two of our three chestnut trees have only grown two metres in 35 years because they have never been fed or watered by human hands, but they fruit anyway.

One day they will be massive, but probably not in my lifetime. You can safely plant a chestnut now, pick its fruit from about five years onwards, fail to look after it in any way, and expect to leave the "What the heck am I going to do with this giant?" part to a professional tree lopper in a few decades.

You could even resolutely keep the branches pruned, or put in 'root guards' - Colorbond planted about two metres out from the tree roots on either side as a form of chestnut bonsai.

Don't be tempted to buy cheap seedlings - stick to named varieties. Chestnuts flower in great, long, creamy catkins, well after frost. Single trees fruit quite happily, though sometimes they may sulk a bit and do better with another tree for cross pollination. They will drop their big, leathery leaves in autumn, so are a good shade tree for hot summers and cold winters. Don't plant them close to the foundations. A mighty tree usually has mighty roots.

Apart from the glorious nuts, the best thing about chestnuts is that they are almost un-killable, except by wallabies if there is absolutely nothing else to eat, and even then the tree tops soon grow out of reach.

If you have a block of land you intend to use in 10 or 20 years' time but have no time to tend now, consider planting a chestnut grove. Invest in a weekend of planting, a few tree guards, water the trees now and then for the first summer, then ignore them, except possibly for a once a year excursion to harvest.

White cockatoos munch their way through out walnuts but ignore the prickly chestnut casings. Chestnuts are most vulnerable when they fall when ripe and split open, as that's when bush rats appear, or even non bush rats.

Older varieties, especially seedlings, often keep their prickly case sealed, which means a struggle with thick gloves and a knife to get to the nut below.

Modern varieties are naturally accessible, usually with larger nuts but still, wonderfully, medieval delicious.

This is possibly why humanity falls into two camps: those who don't know chestnuts, or can't be bothered with them; and those who become truly nutty about them each autumn.