Posted on 07/18/2007 6:39:48 AM PDT by Daffynition
I won’t live long enough to see it, but it would be a great thing to have elms and chestnuts become common again.
I agree.
I have a vague recolection of a few Chestnut trees that grew in my hometown.
Apropos surname for such an endeavor.
I hope it works. I love trees, although I’m allergic to them. :)
There was a time when the American chestnut was the very heart of our forests. Wild life of many kinds depended on its nuts, which often fell in such abundance as to carpet the floor of the forest. Rural folk depended on the nuts too (as did their livestock), for they were tasty and nutritious. And the American chestnut provided timber unrivalled in quality. Straight-grained and strong, easy to work and rot resistant, chestnut lumber went into everything from barn beams to furniture.
That time is gone. This tree, once the dominant species over much of our Eastern forests, was brought down by a disease. It was not a native disease but an exotic one, an accidentally imported fungus to which our trees had no resistance. From its point of introduction in New York City around the turn of the century, the Asian chestnut blight moved outward at a remarkable pace; fifty years later, all that remained of the species on which so much richness of life depended were millions of acres of dead but still standing stems.
But the time of the chestnut can return. Recent developments in genetics and plant pathology promise that this magnificent tree will again become part of our natural heritage. In 1983, responding to these developments, a group of prominent scientists established The American Chestnut Foundation.
Not too long ago, the American chestnut was one of the most important trees of forested from Maine south to Georgia, from the Piedmont west to the Ohio valley. In the heart of its range only a few generations ago, a count of trees would have turned up one chestnut for every four oaks, birches, maples and other hardwoods. Many of the dry ridgetops of the central Appalachians were so thoroughly crowded with chestnut that, in early summer, when their canopies were filled with creamy-white flowers, the mountains appeared snow-capped.
And the trees could be giants. In virgin forests throughout their range, mature chestnuts averaged up to five feet in diameter and up to one hundred feet tall. Many specimens of eight to ten feet in diameter were recorded, and there were rumors of trees bigger still.
Native wildlife from birds to bears, squirrels to deer, depended on the tree's abundant crops of nutritious nuts. And chestnut was a central part of eastern rural economies. As winter came on, attics were often stacked to the rafters with flour bags full of the glossy, dark brown nuts. Spring houses and smokehouses were hung with hams and other products from livestock that had fattened on the harvest gleanings. And what wasn't consumed was sold. Chestnut was an important cash crop for many Appalachian families,. As the year-end holidays approached, nuts by the railroad car-full were shipped to New York and Philadelphia and other big cities where street vendors sold them fresh-roasted.
The tree was also one of the best for timber. It grew straight and often branch-free for up to fifty feet. Loggers tell of loading entire railroad cars with boards cut from just one tree. Straight-grained, lighter in weight than oak and more easily worked, chestnut was as rot resistant as redwood. It was used for virtually everything - telegraph poles. Railroad ties, paneling, fine furniture, musical instruments, even pulp and plywood.
Then the chestnut blight struck. First discovered in 1904 in New York City, the lethal fungus - Asian organism to which our native chestnuts had very little resistance - spread quickly. In its wake it left only dead and dying stems. By 1950, except for the shrublike spouts the species continually produces (and which also quickly become infected), the keystone species on some nine million acres of eastern forests had disappeared.
For decades plant pathologists and breeders tried to create a blight-resistant tree by crossing our own species with the resistant Chinese tree, but always with unsatisfactory results. Now, advances in our understanding of genetics have shown us where those early researchers went wrong. More importantly, we now know what path we must take to successfully breed an American chestnut with resistance to this deadly invader. We now know we can have this precious tree back. (American Chestnut Foundation.)
Wonderful news!
Truly inspirational.
Longfellow
I have a friend that has a 30” diameter chestnut in his front yard. It has somehow escaped the fungus for about 30 years he has had the house. Perhaps there are no other chestnuts capable of spreading the blight in the local area.
This is a web photo of this incredible monster, the largest tree in CT. My photos of it aren't much better because the light was all wrong at that time of day when I was there.
Connecticut's Largest Tree, a sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) is named in memory of Gifford Pinchot. The tree is located on the east bank of the Farmington River in the Weatogue section of Simsbury. The late William Linke of New London, who began the Notable Trees Project, provides scale in this 1985 photograph by G. Dreyer.
A marker at the site reads:
THE PINCHOT SYCAMORE
CIRCUMFERENCE 23 FEET 7 INCHES
DEDICATED MAY 1 1965
IN MEMORY OF
GIFFORD PINCHOT
1865 - 1946
BORN IN SIMSBURY, CONNECTICUT, CO-FOUNDER OF
THE YALE SCHOOL OF FORESTRY, FIRST CHIEF OF
THE US FORESTRY SERVICE, CONSERVATION
ADVISOR TO PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT,
GOVERNOR OF PENNSYLVANIA
RE-DEDICATED IN 1978
AS A GIFT TO THE TOWN OF SIMSBURY
BY CHARLES SCHNIER
THIS MARKER GIVEN BY SIMSBURY RESIDENTS
INTERESTED IN CONSERVATION
I want chestnuts back. My great-grandfather was a housebuilder and carpenter and his favorite wood was chestnut. In the sixties and seventies he still had access to “wormy chestnut” - the trees were dead and tunnelled a bit by wood borers but they did not rot.
I keep waiting and hoping for them to release nuts or tissue-culture saplings - I would plant them in a minute.
Mrs VS
The American Chestnut Foundation in Bennington VT expects to have limited quantities of a highly blight-resistant backcross chestnuts available for initial testing and research (though not available to the general public). Seeds are expected to be available for wider distribution in the following 5 to 15 years.
Currently, TACF members are able to purchase PURE, not resistant, and guaranteed to blight (see Q&A #2) American chestnut seeds and seedlings.
Once there were 4 billion trees. Then came the blight...
How many different strains of chestnuts are there? I remember in the 70’s, there were two pretty healthy chestnut trees in a patch below the house... (West Tennessee)
Really sharp spikes on the hulls of the nuts, and really meaty brown kernals inside, about the size of 1/3 of a golf ball, I guess. I seem to remember my grandfather calling them “Horse Chestnuts”.
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