Under the spreading chestnut tree....

I heard, or read, somewhere recently that Longfellow's smith was
actually doing business beneath the boughs of a horse chestnut (one of
the Aesculus tribe, not the Castaneas). It's been forty years or more
since I read that particular bit of bucolic tripe, but I don't recall
any internal evidence supporting any such conclusion. On the other
hand, I don't remember anything to the contrary either......though I
do recall something about an actual particular tree being referenced
and later used for something or other.

Be that as it may, Longfellow was an easterner and would certainly
have been familiar with the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata), as
anyone living in America in the 18th century could not help but be.
The horse chestnuts, eminent in their own rights, as any unbiased
sylviculturist must admit, could not hold a candle to the magnificent
forest giant that carpeted the landscape from the fall line in the
east to the foothills of the far west, such as it was at the time, and
from Georgia and Alabama to the far reaches of the Adirondacks and
Poconos and beyond. Anyone in the least familiar with the griant
forest that spanned the great Appalachian chain MUST have known the
American chestnut well.

In her recent book, "The American Chestnut," Susan Freinkel's
subtitle, "The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree" is no mere
hyperbole. Given the ethos and the economics of the place and time,
the American chestnut WAS a perfect tree. Unlike most fruit bearing
trees (yes, they ALL produce some sort of fruit or other in strictly
scientific botanical terms, but I won't bother differentiating.....you
know what I mean.....or you never will) the chestnut produced an
abudant crop every year, as opposed to the normal pattern of a single
boom year followed by several of bust. And it was a crop that
fattened, annually, a few billion passenger pigeons, some millions of
turkeys, innumerable squirrels, uncountable other small rodents,
millions of deer, hundreds of thousands of bears, raccoons, foxes,
dogs, crows, ravens, jays woodpeckers and......not least important by
any means from a colonial American point of view.....millions of hogs,
who were turned loose in the forests every fall to feast on the free
bounty (you knew that part, except that the textbooks almost
invariable speak of acorns, walnuts, beechnuts, butternuts and
hickories, with only an occasional reference to the chestnut) and
fatten up for market or home butchery. Incidentally, the reason most
often given for the chestnut's annual bounty is that unlike most nuts,
its are very low in fats, high in carbohydrates. Fats require a much
greater caloric investment. Whatever.

The really odd thing about all of this is that the chestnut comes
wrapped in perhaps Nature's most formidable physical defense
mechanism. The thousands of needle sharp (you've heard this a million
times, but in this case it is most literally true) spines surrounding
the chestnut burr are proof against even the most ravenous of pigs,
bears, and squirrels. Were it not for the fact that the burrs split
and spill their guts (as it were) when the nuts are ripe, ALL would go
hungry. The burrs would pile up several feet thick beneath a mature
tree (as it is, they may be up to six inches deep anyway) until they
rotted away, and NOTHING but worms and maggots could get at the
contents.

So?

So, that's the way it used to be. But those days are
gone.....forever. In 1904, in the Bronx Zoological Gardens, a
perceptive sylviculturist noticed that his chestnuts were dying.
Thirty or so years later they were gone......ALL gone.....4 or 6
billion trees had died of a blight (a fungus that hitchhiked in on
Chinese chestnuts) and/or an ax or saw wielded by a land owner advised
by the USDA that he might as well cut the trees down and get something
for the wood before the blight killed them. THE dominant tree of the
eastern American forest....Gone. Forever. Finis. And most Americans
living today can't remember ever hearing of it......and certainly
haven't ever seen one.

Wellllllll.......

Not quite forever (which is a very long time)......maybe.

Trees (and what IS a "tree" anyway.....and how does one explain this
remarkable display of parallel evolution in so many botanical
taxa?.....but that's a theme for some day when a world populated by
adults is interested in discussion) have, like most other plants and
animals, evolved numerous and often remarkable strategies for
survival. A common strategy among trees, at which the chestnut
excels, is regrowth from stumps. When a chestnut is felled, whether
by human or inhuman agency, it sends up vigorous new growth from the
still living tissue at the edges of the stump. The key to this
strategy, in this instance, is that the blight generally takes several
years to reinfect the new growth to a stage which once again proves
fatal. In the meantime, the chestnut, an extraodinarily fast grower,
matures to the point of bearing fruit which results in new trees that
keep ahead, barely, of the blight. No less important is the fact that
the blight spores, light and windborne as they are, nevertheless have
a limited range of travel. Isolated pockets of chestnuts have thrived
(mostly unnoticed.....which is, in large part, why they survived) for
the past century in out of the way places. One such place is
southwestern Wisconsin where, until the 1980s, when they were
"discovered" by spore laden scientists, chestnut "forests" (actually
small to large groves) were entirely blight free. No such luck
today. But there are still thousands of blight free trees. Nobody
knows how many there are here....or elsewhere. That's because (in
part) the people that own them or know them aren't talking.....that's
how they stay blight free.

But......

But, some people are talking and growing and showing and sowing and
sharing and hybridizing and grafting and cross-pollinating. There are
hybrids (with the Chinese.....not as ironic as it sounds, if you think
about it and understand the rudiments of biology) and backcrosses and
blah and blah......

The bottom line is that an essentially extinct native species (and an
economically as well as aesthetically important one) turns out to be
not quite so extinct after all.....not yet, anyway.

So?

So, the American Chestnut is still critically endangered.....poised on
the very brink of extinction.....but it is also balanced precariously
on the very brink of recovery. And YOU can make a
difference.....maybe. All you have to do is to plant a couple of
chestnut trees (not too far apart.....50-100 feet, max.....because
they do not self pollinate) and wait a few years (perhaps as few as
four or five in good growing conditions.....yeah, they are THAT
amazing) for the appearance of another crop of nuts to pass on and
keep the gene pool alive.

Sure.....easy to say.....but where does one come by such a precious
commodity as highly endangered American Chestnut seed (which, by the
way, are MUCH more palatable than their Chinese and European cousins,
though also considerable smaller.....but's lets not talk about eating
endangered seed right now, o.k.?) if they are so rare and endangered?

Ah! The crux of the matter..... at last!

Right here.

Becky and I have about five hundred of them......the details of the
acquisition (which necessarily include yet another paean to the great
fundamental driving principle of the universe, coincidence) are fodder
for another time....to be provided to anyone who asks.....or who asks
for nuts. Meanwhile, here they are, free for the asking ("free"
refering strictly to the cost of acquisition.....they may, over the
lifespan of the trees.....or yours, for that matter.....require some
small cost in care and attention).

So, who wants to save a specis?

giles