The water chestnut

One of the characteristic plants of Lake Fimon is the water chestnut, which has been growing in these waters for a very long time.

The water chestnut, or Trapa natans, to give it its scientific name, is an annual aquatic plant with a submerged stem and leaf rosettes floating on the surface. The plant remains afloat thanks to the swollen leaf stalks, which are rich in aerenchyma tissue and therefore filled with air. The most distinctive feature of this plant is its fruit, which has four strong, pointed spines. The fruit is also edible. When I was young, I tasted some of them myself. The fact that it was used as a food source has also been confirmed by the discovery of large quantities of its fruits at archaeological sites, both from the Neolithic settlement at Molino Casarotto and from the sites excavated by Paolo Lioy at Pascolone and Ponte della Debba, where substantial quantities of plant remains were found, clearly indicating that they had been used as food. The water chestnut was abundant in Lake Fimon until the 1980s, when it began a slow decline due to the presence of the coypu, a rodent which feeds on the ripe fruits and thus preventing the plant from reproducing in the years that follow. Within the province of Vicenza, this plant is found exclusively in Lake Fimon. For this reason, it deserves targeted conservation measures aimed at safeguarding the last remaining specimens still present in the lake.