Any experience w Chinese Pistache?

I happened across a pistacia chinensis tree on the street while visiting California the other day and smelled its leaves. What a delicious aroma!

Internet searches turned up mostly lack of information, as usual.

Anyone here have experience with these trees, specifically:

1. Use of leaves as vegetable for humans and/or livestock?

2. Use of drupes / seeds as food for livestock or humans?

3. What’s the coldest climate you have seen these successfully growing in? I’m in USDA zone 5. Some Internet sources say pistacia chinensis grows down to zone 6, but I’m wondering if anyone knows of plants growing in Zone 5. After all, there are Iranian pistachios growing well in zone 6…


Edit: edited above to be clearer about where I came across the tree (not in my home zone, unfortunately).

I've not heard of these, Bing.  Thank you for posting on them.  Now I need to dig to see if anyone has done hybridizing between this species and pistachio, P. vera.  Zone 5 pistachios would be quite the gift to the world!
So far all I've found is that P. chinensis has been used as a rootstock for P. vera.

Here is my experience.

In 2014 I have planted 6 pistachio trees: 5 Kerman female and 1 Peters male. At that time I was commuting twice a year to California from Midwest and did not have time to baby any trees, because I was focusing on building. The trees were growing fine with intermittent watering by hand by some friends. One female died. For 9 years I have not seen a single flower, but was convincing myself that because of my unique microclimate I have to wait one or two more years. Two weeks ago I was getting some heavy lumber from a mill surrounded by orchards with trees that I could not recognize. I was seeing these trees for years. I was in some shock when I noticed that theses trees have pistachios hanging and look complete different than what I have.
It turned out that my mismanagement of the trees allowed the extremely vigorous rootstock to overgrow and literally absorb the scion and what I have are five massive and useless Chinese pistachios, because they are used as rootstock. I realized that for years I was cultivating ornamental trees in my fruit orchard. I got so angry that I wanted to cut them right away and later bring an excavator and dig them out, but restrained my plans and realized that now I have perfectly developed rootstock for regrafting with actual pistachio. The branches are 80-100 mm diameter. In the early spring I'm going to chop half of each tree, leave 2 or 3 branches and do cleft grafting with two scions per branch and later I will remove the weaker one. In another year I will chop the rest.

After I realized what I'm growing I'm seeing Chinese pistachio trees everywhere in the cities. The suckers from the tree grew 1.5 m tall since I cut them 7 months ago. I know they would survive untouched with no irrigation.
The positive of that is that after grafting such huge trees I should have nuts relatively quickly.

Regarding the temperatures - the lowest I recorded on my land was 21 F, but I'm sure it can get lower to 10.

Another lessons is to be careful with trees grafted on vigorous rootstock that has no culinary value. If my apples die and rootstock grows I will have one of the best apples - Antonowka, for pears Bartlett (not the best but still good), for plums myrobalam plum and so on.

Cristobal - have you tried eating the leaves of the Chinese Pistache?

I pulled out my copy of "Cornucopia II" by Stephen Facciola and it had the following to say about Pistacia chinensis:  "Young shoots and leaves are eaten as a vegetable.  The nuts are roasted and eaten or employed in confectionery.  China, cultivated."

So now I am quite interested in learning more.  One site listed its hardiness to zone 5 and thought zone 4 might be possible if the seeds were sourced from its northern most range limits.  I hope someone who has tried it can post regarding how they think it tastes.  I may need to plant some of these  

Bing Cheah wrote:Cristobal - have you tried eating the leaves of the Chinese Pistache?

I just tried a young one - leathery, little bit pungent like radish. I would not consider it edible for humans. Maybe in times of famine/war and rather scalded with hot water. My sheep like them. I can't wait when I chop and graft them.