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 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.
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
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.
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.