Posted on 07/18/2007 6:39:48 AM PDT by Daffynition
-- A healthy American chestnut tree discovered on a New Hampshire farm may serve as the "mother tree" to bring back a species nearly wiped out by Asian blight.
The tree was found on a 125-acre parcel owned by Bill and Nancy Yates. Bill Yates remembers 60 years ago when American chestnuts lined the road near his home before the tree was all but wiped out on the Eastern seaboard. American Chestnut Foundation officials hope to use the tree as a way to bring the tree back to New Hampshire.
Leila Pinchot, the foundation's New England science coordinator, pollinated the 40-foot tree Monday using pollen from a Tennessee chestnut that has developed resistance to the blight.
The Asian blight, which first started infecting American chestnuts around 1904 in New York City, is a fungus that enters wounds in trees and grows in and under the bark until it has grown through the trunk, according to the foundation.
Scientists have crossed the Chinese chestnut, which is resistant to the fungus, with the American chestnut to produce blight-resistant trees. The process is a slow, but may eventually make chestnut a common species again, Pinchot said.
Pinchot put 80 small bags around blossoms on the Yates' tree 10 days ago. After pollinating the blossoms Monday, she retied the bags to prevent airborne pollen from fertilizing or blocking the fertilization of the blight-resistant pollen.
Sometime this fall, the tree should produce chestnuts that will be collected and planted in a Vermont orchard where they will be closely monitored, Pinchot said.
The foundation said eight trees have been pollinated this way and their nuts harvested over the past year. The goal is to cross-pollinate 20 trees in Vermont and New Hampshire.
Pinchot said the foundation also has been working with the state to plant the blight-resistant trees in state forests.
The foundation has just recently started a chapter in New Hampshire and Vermont.
Yates contacted the foundation after seeing an ad in a magazine.
"They were very interested because they said it was a pure American chestnut," Yates said.
Don Black, coordinator for forest resources for the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, said chestnuts once were one of the most valuable trees in the United States.
"They were good for firewood, furniture and houses because they don't rot, and they have an edible nut," he added. "It's a beautiful wood."
If the cross-pollination program works, the state will have chestnuts again, said Black.
"People have been waiting for something like this for a long time," he said.
Past efforts have not succeeded. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station launched vigorous programs soon after the blight was discovered. But the program failed to produce trees with strong resistance to blight that also retained the desirable traits of the American chestnut. The U.S. program was discontinued in 1960, according to the foundation.
The foundation has worked with the Connecticut agency, whose program continued.
Blight-resistant trees have been planted in orchards in Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts, Pinchot said.
"In the next couple of years we should have resistant nuts in New Hampshire," Pinchot said. "There are chestnut roads everywhere (in New England), and it shows how big a part of the landscape it was. It can be again."
Chestnut is a common name for several species of trees in the genus Castanea, in the Beech family Fagaceae.
Neither the horse chestnut (family Sapindaceae) nor the water chestnut (family Cyperaceae) is closely related to the chestnut, though both are so named for producing similar nuts. The name Castanea comes from an old Latin name for the sweet chestnut.
American Chestnuts are special and rare.
Thanks! I suppose I’ll have to start using Wiki, although I’m not too sure about something I could edit myself....
Appreciate your reply.
My father's ancestors come from the level of the mountains where the chestnut trees grow, in Italy. All the men were all carpenters when they came here. Usually when all the immigrants from one town have the same profession, it's because the older immigrants teach the newer ones from their same town. In this case, it's because the sawmill was there (Serra San Bruno) and they all learned to make beautiful things out of the wood.
At Christmastime, I used to watch the old men taste the chestnuts, like they were sampling a fine wine. It's a mystery to me why we have no fabulous chestnut recipes in our family, though. Maybe the chestnuts were considered too marvelous and rare, since the trees bore only a short part of the year. Would you chop them up and make something else out of them?
I think there’s a foundation for the American elm — surviving trees apparently had some natural immunity to elm blight, and seeds / seedlings were available (this was ten or more years ago that I read this) for planting.
However, the way to keep elms healthy (and elms continue to germinate from seeds which have been sleeping in the soil, for example) is to keep them isolated from other elms. They tend to germinate and grow in clumps, so thin them out / cull them.
some little bit of info about chestnut and elm:
http://www.endangeredspecieshandbook.org/projects_saving.php
ah ha! Here it is.
http://www.libertyelm.com/about.htm
The Liberty elm is not a hybrid. ERI’s American Liberty elm is actually a group of six genetically different cultivars. All six look like classic, old fashioned American elms. “You have to look closely and know what you’re looking for to tell the difference among the six,” says Hansel. “To be sure which one you have, you really need DNA analysis.”
Genetic differences provide diversity. Having six cultivars in the series is insurance against all the elms being wiped out by any disease or problem, even one that might show up in the future. ERI mixes all six cultivars in its shipments.
I work with similar organization called the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation who have chosen not to seek blight resistance by crossing with the Asian variety. Our goal is to develop an All American blight resistant tree.
I administer a grove containing approximately 30 all American trees grown from seeds developed by crossing trees exhibiting blight resistance such as the one noted in New Hampshire.
I can very proudly report that I currently have 7 small trees grown from chestnuts produced on the trees in my grove.
Most of my trees exhibit aome blight resistance. I have one producing burrs that so far has no blight. It is 10 years old.
Here is our website: http://www.ppws.vt.edu/griffin/accf.html
I started my association with ACCF in 1990... saving Chestnut trees is slow work. I have 2 trees that are 17 years old
thanks for bringing me to the thread. See my post above
.....American Chestnuts are special and rare.....
Special, but not as rare as you might think.
The blight kills the main stem but can not go underground. The root structure remains intact ans puts up shoots. The mountains of Western North Carolina, East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia host many many trees grown from the roots. Hikers in our mountains know that there are many locations with such growth. These trees generally are reinfected at around 10 years or so and the cycle resumes.
A program of the ACCF takes scions from All American Chestnut produced trees with blight resistance trees are grafted to these powerful old root structures.
I should note that the ACCF program is the work of Dr Gary Griffin at VA Tech and his counterpart in West Virginia.
Over the years, volenteer cooperators such as my self have planted many thoisand seeds and seedlings all across the species range.
Bless you for your diligent work. Future generations will thank you too. To work with a living legacy must be very gratifying.
It may happen sooner than we think.
If I read correctly elsewhere, just this spring, this foundation started planting the first generation of highly blight-resistant Chestnuts in some WV and KY reclaimed mine sites. The trees won’t be available to the public until 2015.
As far as elms, there are a handful of disease-resistant varieties out there that can be bought from a few nurseries today.
The difference with elms is that while Dutch Elm Disease is also destructive, it’s not quite as rampant as Chestnut Blight, to where it’s not all that unusual to see American Elms of large size here and there, but large American Chestnuts are VERY rare, some feel there are less than 100 large, healthy American Chestnuts left in North America.
I see 100 American Elms on my way to work each day. They WILL get DED and die eventually, but most of them live to be old enough to reproduce and therefore the species is a lot more common.
That said the resistant-elms could also prove to bring the species back to it’s fullest extent.
I have 20 more at a second site
The trees are from similar crosses with old Chestnut trees that have escaped the blight. they are second and third generation crosses.I have 6 trees that produce nuts. One is blight free. The others exhibit some symptoms.
I work with The American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation. The scientists allow no Asian or European genes and are working with All American trees.
Here's the website http://ipm.ppws.vt.edu/griffin/accf.html
Thank you for all you do in behalf of these grand trees!
As long as elms are kept isolated, they can grow to very large size, and there’s just not enough of them to spread the disease. Also, I’ve not seen an infected elm around here in years, so the disease may have died out.
Just yesterday I was admiring a nice one in the yard of one of my mother’s neighbors, and that house was built less than 40 years ago. There’s a very nice one on the back line of the mom’s property, probably in the area of 40 years old (if that), and I plan to clear out the much smaller, more recent, and more crowded specimens nearby. :’)
Some elms were naturally immune; they’ve been bred into a resistant native elm strain which at least used to be available from the foundation that did the work.
As long as elms are kept isolated, they can grow to very large size, and there’s just not enough of them to spread the disease. Also, I’ve not seen an infected elm around here in years, so the disease may have died out.
Just yesterday I was admiring a nice one in the yard of one of my mother’s neighbors, and that house was built less than 40 years ago. There’s a very nice one on the back line of the mom’s property, probably in the area of 40 years old (if that), and I plan to clear out the much smaller, more recent, and more crowded specimens nearby. :’)
Some elms were naturally immune; they’ve been bred into a resistant native elm strain which at least used to be available from the foundation that did the work.
Thanks!
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