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Illustration Ryan Kirby/NWTF
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Chestnut
by Tom Kelly
Just after the beginning of the 20th century, in about 1904, although nobody is absolutely sure of the precise time, a new disease of trees was introduced into the state of New York. The name of this killer was the chestnut blight; it was a fungus, a bark disease. And in accordance with the third corollary of Murphy’s Law, the one that says, “If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one that does go wrong,” the disease attacked the American chestnut.
If there ever was an all-American tree, a tree that walked on water, leapt tall buildings with a single bound and out of a possible 10 on the perfection scale scored a solid 14, it was the American chestnut.
The Dendrology text says, “Chestnut is a fast-growing tree that attains a height of 70 to 90 feet with a diameter of 3 to 4 feet. Until the early part of the 20th century it was a much used and highly valued species not only because of its rapid growth and durable wood, (it is as rot resistant as heart cypress) but also on account of its fruit which was commonly roasted and sold on the local market.”
Every word of that description is true but to stop there is the precise equivalent of saying that Cleopatra was a pretty girl and then putting a period at the end of the sentence. There was way more to Cleopatra than simply being pretty, and there is substantially more to the chestnut than there was to Cleopatra.
In addition to the high quality of the lumber, the tree produced fruit that was in a class all by itself. A mature chestnut can produce 6,000 nuts in a given year, while the oaks, depending on the species, produce somewhere between 300 and 1,000.
Chestnuts have almost double the amount of protein than acorns — 11 percent versus 6 percent — and the carbohydrate component of chestnuts is 40 percent. The nuts taste as good to people as they do to game, and a tree such as the chestnut, bearing nuts in the quantities that it does, produced a source of food for game that is almost impossible to evaluate. Its range in the United States covered the Northeast, the Appalachian region, and the Ohio Valley. It amounted to some 200 million acres, 27 percent of the timbered area of the U.S. In total, the chestnut made up, in those regions, 25 percent of the hardwood stand.
The native American chestnut trees were almost totally destroyed in a period of 35 years.
The Asiatic chestnut is immune to the blight and efforts began as early as the middle 1930s to cross the American chestnut with various Asiatic species to produce a tree that was blight resistant. Beginning experiments in the form of backcrossing American to Chinese chestnut has been carried on by the American Chestnut Foundation for some 25 years now, and there have been some very promising developments in the past two or three years.
The American Chestnut Foundation has produced its first crop of blight resistant nuts and has test plantings on federal forestland under agreement with the USDA Forest Service. Scientists are currently evaluating the first generation of blight resistant trees. There is real hope that, within the next 10 years, such nuts will be available to the public for restoration efforts on private land.
They are very, very close to success. The value of a restored blight resistant chestnut for use by game, especially a game food of the value and availability of American chestnuts, may well be one of the most exciting success stories in the history of conservation.
To find out more about the availability of seed and seedlings, and the state of the project in general, visit www.acf.org.
It is entirely possible — it is indeed very likely — that the blind pigs have stumbled across something far more valuable than a single acorn.
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