(Credit: American Chestnut Restoration Foundation/USDAFS). The American chestnut was one of the largest trees in the forests of eastern North America. Nor has the chestnut itself ever really gone away, notes Essie Burnworth, head of the ACF’s Maryland chapter: “There are millions of them around, sprouting from old stumps, sitting as seedlings in the forest understory, just waiting for light to grow.”. Then they do it all over again, generation after generation, hoping that genetic theory, forecasting a chestnut worthy of reintroduction after six crosses, corresponds to reality. It is estimated that between 3 and 4 billion American chestnut trees were destroyed in the first half of the 20… Hebard was even a model for a character in local writer Barbara Kingsolver’s best selling novel, Prodigal Summer: The American chestnut’s distinctive leaves, burs, and nuts. Before the species was devastated by the chestnut blight, a fungal disease, it was one of the most important forest trees throughout its range. With the state chapters, we’ll put millions of these trees throughout their range.” They will go, Hebard says, on available lands in national forests, on private property, and also to reforest abandoned strip-mined sites across Appalachia in a partnership with the federal Office of Surface Mining. Now, thanks to collaboration between the U.S. Forest Service, The American Chestnut Foundation and institutions like the University of Tennessee Tree Improvement Program, those blight-resistant trees are on the horizon, and scientists are developing silvicultural strategies to restore them to forests across their former range. Of literally billions of chestnuts growing in the tree’s historic range when the blight hit, only dozens of pre-blight survivors struggle on in the wild today. Backcrossing was how the King Ranch bred its famed Santa Gertrudis cattle to produce excellent meat while surviving the harsh south-Texas environment. Most were nearly barren of branches for 50 feet or better, living up to what would become their nickname, “the redwood of the East.” These were massive trunks, some 16 … Burnham had always assumed that program, which crossed thousands of American and Chinese trees since the 1930s, would eventually succeed. Their bold-grained, blondish wood was strong, easily worked, and extremely rot-resistant, used in everything from barn timbers to pianos, split-rail fences to fine furniture (in which it was often veneered with more fashionable woods like mahogany). American chestnut was once a dominant and widespread canopy tree through many parts of the country, its range stretching from Mississippi to Maine. American chestnut - Castanea dentata Native Range Border Related Maps. Just as the chestnut blight appears here to stay, so does the movement to restore the chestnut to its place in the forest. By Tom Horton, Healthy American chestnuts in Lesesne State Park. And next spring in Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County, about 500 more of the blight-resistant chestnuts will be planted on a private, cutover forest plot, Steiner says. In Carroll County, Maryland, in partnership with the American Chestnut Foundation and American Forests, more than 18,000 school children each year participate in a science curriculum built around experimental chestnut orchards. “By the time a white oak acorn has made a baseball bat, the chestnut stump has made a railroad tie,” one advocate boasted. Some oak species (Quercusspp.) With this latest hybrid, unofficially dubbed the “Restoration” chestnut, breeders feel they have a tree with enough of the Chinese chestnut’s natural blight resistance to have a shot at surviving; but also a tree that is virtually indistinguishable in form, growth rate, and wood quality from a pure American chestnut. Burnham and other scientists in 1983 founded the private, nonprofit American Chestnut Foundation to carry out a scientific program of backcross breeding. He explains that such a dose probably would have killed even resistant Chinese chestnuts. Griffin has one tree, grafted in the early 1980s, that is now 24 inches in diameter and close to 70 feet tall. deep) as soon as the soil is workable. It has elongate leaves tapered at both ends and large teeth along the margins. The American chestnut (Castanea dentata) was one of the most common trees in the area. Endangered. A modest but historic planting of several hundred little chestnuts has completed their first full growing season in the wild on U.S. Forest Service lands in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. TACF National Office 50 North Merrimon Avenue, Suite 115, Asheville, NC 28804, Phone: 828-281-0047 Fax: 828-253-5373 chestnut@acf.org. “Oh, they all died.” Tax ID: 53-0196544, © 2021 American Forests. (Credit: Robert Llewellyn). More than a thousand place names that contain the word chestnut remain today throughout the Appalachians, which were the heart of the species’ range. It was most commonly found on hillsides and ridges. “It was just a preliminary test, with no controls, not a scientific experiment,” he says. If trees could talk...a region's history as told by its ancient trees. He hit them hard with a massive dose, much more severe than they’d have received in nature, he says. In the next couple years, Hebard says, there will be larger-scale, more formal experiments testing the latest generation of trees’ resistance alongside Chinese chestnuts. Learn how to identify American chestnuts and send us a sample to support our research. And because chestnuts blossom relatively late, their nut crop was never hit by the late frosts that often diminish the mast of oaks and hickories. Once these crosses produced trees that were carrying chiefly the American chestnut genome — as much as 90 percent — they were ... state and national sites in the chestnut’s historical range. And before they died, the little chestnuts exhibited about the same response to the blight, forming only slight cankers, as he would have expected of naturally resistant Chinese chestnuts. Meanwhile, the original blight is able to remain dormant in dozens of non-chestnut tree species, from which it respreads by wind and by birds. Griffin, an emeritus professor of plant pathology, has been working since 1973 grafting tissue from old survivors (and younger ones that have made it to about 15 inches in diameter) onto American chestnut rootstock, crossing these to one another. ACCF geneticists calculated that perhaps 10% (estimates range from 5% to 20%) of the plants produced in this manner will exhibit blight resistance at least as favorable as the parent trees. Known as “redwoods of the East,” chestnuts grew fast and big, and lived long, reaching 100 feet in height, with diameters exceeding 12 feet, and attaining an average age of two to three centuries. American Chestnut Habitat The graphic shows the range.... Eastern North America, from Mississippi to Maine mostly on the spine of mountainous uplands that slopes in an upwards, northeasterly direction from the Southland. When you decide to start planting American chestnut trees, it’s important to begin early in the spring. The American Chestnut Foundation is working to restore the chestnut to its natural range. If there was an “Aha!” moment in bringing American chestnuts back this far from the brink, it came around 1980 when Charles Burnham, a corn geneticist, read of the shutdown of a decades-long, failed attempt by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to breed a resistant chestnut. Its nuts were consumed by animals and people alike, and it was widely used as timber. One fourth of this forest was composed of native chestnut trees. “This means that our goal after 25 years has moved from breeding a chestnut that can survive to working on landscape-level restoration.”. American chestnut is a member of the beech family. All Rights Reserved. According to a historical publication, "many of the dry ridge tops of the central Appalachians were so thoroughly crowded with chestnut that, in early summer, when their canopies were filled with creamy-white flowers, the … The American chestnut tree was extremely useful to those who lived in its range. Lifespan American chestnuts that are not blight-resistant live only about five years. And you get an award-winning magazine. It is also adaptable to different soils and climates, and established plants can withstand drought. American chestnut. With the chestnuts, it meant carefully selecting parent stock (cloned offspring of the USDA’s Clapper tree were among the first generation), then laboriously hand-pollinating the trees, and bagging female flowers in plastic to keep out undesired pollen. The American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) is a large, deciduous tree of the beech family native to eastern North America. For example, a Green Mountain National Forest planting, ma… Status Endangered While the Chestnut Foundation’s new, resistant trees are the first soldiers to be deployed against the blight, other ongoing programs could soon bear fruit: a chestnut genetically engineered for blight resistance; genetically altered strains of the blight fungus itself that weaken it; and, farther from success, breeding a pure native with resistance by crossing old survivor chestnuts to one another. American chestnut. Native range of the American chestnut tree (castanea dentata). Planting will continue in national forests. (Courtesy photo American Chestnut Foundation) Sometimes reaching a height of more than 100 feet tall with trunk diameters often well over 10 feet, the American chestnut was the giant of the eastern U.S. forests. Map Legend. Plant and Tree Range Distribution Maps; Castanea dentata Map ; Castanea dentata - American chestnut Range Map. It was a magnificent tree used for lumber and for food. This species once was a dominant … You cross Chinese and American parent trees, then breed successive generations back to the desired (American) parent, eventually winnowing out all the undesired Chinese characteristics (shrubby growth, for example) except for its disease-resistance. “And how do you feel about that?” So far, neither the hypovirulence or his transgenic blight seem able to spread efficiently on their own in the wild, which would be essential for becoming effective across the landscape. It’s possible that hypovirulence might help, in Hebard’s words, “to put the, These restoration chestnuts at Meadowview Research Farm show resistance to the blight. At the University of Maryland’s Biotechnology Center in Shadyside, virologist Donald Nuss has been dissecting the American strains of hypovirulence, trying to understand why they don’t spread as easily in the wild here as they do in Europe. Silvicultural trials allow us to learn how chestnut grows under different forest management scenarios. American Forests Reflects on Florence Harding During 2019 International Women's DayPerhaps Florence Mabel. “They have some natural resistance, they are infected by the hypovirulence, and they have very good growing environments.”. These “redwoods of the East,” as they were sometimes called, made up between one quarter and one half … “Chestnut brown was considered the most beautiful shade of a woman’s hair, and the man who had a chestnut beard was usually considered handsome… silks and satins were available in chestnut brown,” wrote 101-year-old Georgia Miller of Pennsylvania a few years ago, recalling her childhood in chestnut forests. . The American chestnut is a broad-leaf tree belonging to the beech family. Today, more than 100 years after a blight forced it into extinction, scientists are resurrecting this once-great tree. By 1989 the American Chestnut Foundation had secured farmland to begin its research and breeding program at the southern end of the Shenandoah Valley in the small town of Meadowview, Virginia. ”. The Romans ranked chestnuts alongside the olive tree and the grapevine as plants important to civilization. “And?” (Credit: American Chestnut Restoration Foundation/USDAFS). The extinction of the passenger pigeon, and the near extinction of bison — all around the same time — were in the same ballpark. That’s the merest wisp of what Peattie described; “But we’re excited,” says Meghan Jordan of the American Chestnut Foundation (ACF), which supplied the trees. More Accounts and Images; ARS Germplasm Resources Information Network (CADE12) Flora of … Chestnuts dominated eastern hardwood forests not only in numbers; an estimated three to four billion trees across more than 30 million acres. Most American chestnuts today are killed by the chestnut blight by the time they reach 15 feet in height. They anticipated the effort would, after several generations, produce a chestnut fit for recovering a vanished part of the American landscape and heritage. Their native range encompasses most of the Appalachian mountain range, as far north as southern Maine and south as far as Alabama. The American chestnut is native to southern and eastern parts of the United States, particularly along the Appalachian Mountains. Before the early 1900s, the American chestnut was the predominant tree species in eastern forests. If you could custom design the ideal tree species, you couldn’t come up with a better one than American chestnut. These trees once reached the height of 30.5 … It is present in parts of West Virginia, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania. The main concession to how the forest has changed since the chestnut last dominated will be a sturdy deer fence (“Please, make deer reduction the lead of your story,” implored one chestnut breeder). Fred Hebard says he’s seen understory chestnuts only an inch in diameter that show 60 years of growth rings, followed by growth that approaches an inch a year after they get access to light. Hebard, now 61, says at best it will be decades before it’s clear how successful he has been. (Credit: Vicky Sawyer). The key is a concept known as backcrossing. Once, their creamy June bloom so festooned the eastern hardwood forests that they looked from afar “like a sea with white combers plowing across its surface,” wrote the naturalist Donald Culross Peattie. Overview Information American chestnut is a plant. He expects that this will allow researchers to produce a chestnut that is pure American except for the addition of a few genes from the Chinese chestnut that confer disease-resistance. For more details on the American chestnut tree, please visit our Field Guide page. Today as we prowl the forests, its hard to think in the past tense and visualize that Castanea dentata, the American When cross-pollinated with another chestnut tree by an insect pollinator, the female flowers develop into spiny bur-like fruits enclosing one to several chestnuts. An estimated 4 billion American chestnuts, up to 1/4 of the hardwood tree population, grew within this range. Wetland Status. Plans have already been laid to take the Meadowview program through another few generations of crossing to get an even better chestnut 20 years hence. There’s also an ancient chestnut tree that Fred Hebard directs you to on your route home from Meadowview. This article was published in the Winter 2010 issue of American Forests magazine. The American chestnut was one of the most important forest trees throughout its range and was considered the finest chestnut tree in the world. Even the Boy Scouts pitched in to try and save the chestnuts, scouring forests for blighted trees as part of a multi-state effort to create an infection-free zone. The American chestnut is a large tree with brown, smooth buds and twigs. Last year, Hebard challenged his first few sixth-generation “restoration” chestnuts by inoculating them with blight. Scientists have found naturally occurring viruses in the forest that are, in effect, a blight of the chestnut blight, infecting it and weakening its destructive power. Far more numerous are chestnuts that sprout from the roots of felled forest giants, only to die in a decade or two from the deadly fungus that may never go away. Researchers have estimated that 1 out of every 4 trees in the Appalachian Mountains was an American chestnut. One of the funders of that project is Duke Energy, which is interested in the chestnut’s potential to reclaim coal-mining land, but also in its promise for sequestering carbon dioxide. Then the chestnut blight came in and began to decimate this species in the early 1900s. The USDA had been crossing American to Chinese chestnuts generation after generation. *Are you enjoying this post? Reaching over 30 metres tall and living up to 500 years, the chestnut was known as “the queen of eastern American forest trees.” So what happened to what was once also called the “redwood of the East?” Scientific Name Scientifically, American chestnut is called Castanea Dentate Description American chestnut plant bears three nuts enfolded in each […] Related Links. To develop resistance to the blight, young trees are inoculated with samples of the chestnut blight fungus. The American chestnut rose 100, sometimes 120, feet above the loamy forest floor. Among his concerns is whether we fully understand all the mechanisms chestnuts employ to resist the blight; also “Will the Chinese chestnut’s resistance, even if we put it all into an American tree, be enough? Reading the USDA’s published results, Burnham was shocked to realize that its scientists, including future Green Revolution Nobelist Norman Borlaug, had ignored a basic tenet of breeding resistance into crops. Flowers are arranged in catkins with numerous tiny male flowers and a cluster of several female flowers at the base of some of the catkins. A project to spot chestnuts sprouting within sight of the Appalachian Trail has so far turned up more than 40,000, Burnworth says. Remnant root systems are resilient and continue to send up new shoots that eventually succumb to the blight. Nuss has cloned the hypovirulence and inserted it into a transgenic chestnut blight whose effects on trees are far less severe. Native range of the American chestnut tree (castanea dentata) The American chestnut tree reigned over 200 million acres of eastern woodlands from Maine to Florida, and from the Piedmont plateau in the Carolinas west to the Ohio Valley, until succumbing to a lethal fungus infestation, known as the chestnut blight, during the first half of the 20th century. The story of the native American tribes is strikingly similar to that of the American chestnut (Castanea dentata). But now comes the best hope in over a century for restoring the species that once comprised a quarter of all eastern hardwoods, with economic and environmental values unmatched by anything in today’s forest. Existing trials have examined planting in gaps of various sizes, clearcuts, closed canopy, shelterwoods, and multi-step management prescriptions. Complementary programs would be added throughout the historic range of the chestnut as the foundation’s state chapters grew to include 15 states. An American Chestnut Tree planted inside Bernheim’s Arboretum Prior to the 1900s, the American chestnut tree once dominated over 200 million acres of the eastern hardwood forest from Maine to Georgia, and west to the Ohio River Valley. Caring for American Chestnut Trees. The little trees represent the sixth generation of a breeding program begun by the 6,000-member ACF in 1989. American chestnut (Castanea dentata), whose native range is shown at left, is highly susceptible to the disease. The blight may evolve, too.”, But “restoration” chestnuts may not be the only tool in our arsenal before long. There are now only 100 or so that remain. The American chestnut was once the king of the forest. Powell says a $5.6-million project that includes sequencing all the genes in the chestnut is two years from completion. Then breeders wait years for the offspring to grow, inoculate them with blight, and select as few as one out of every 150 trees that show the best resistance and most American-like growth habit. But it’s clear this is more than a job to him. The goal has been to develop a blight-resistant strain of the tree and, over time, reintroduce it to its natural range. Chestnut wood was used to make furniture, shingles, siding, telephone poles, and fence posts. European chestnut (C. sativa) is also quite susceptible. Chestnut hybrids, grown at the Hashawa Environmental Center in Carroll County, MD. American chestnut was once the most important tree of the Eastern North American Hardwood Forest. His funding comes from the National Institutes of Health, which is interested in how viruses work; the chestnut hypovirulence is one of the easiest ways to study this, Nuss says. Chinese chestnut (C. mollissima) is resistant; a small canker can occur. (Credit: Melissa Boyle). An Incredible Tree. Burnworth explains that American chestnuts have an extraordinary ability to “release,” or spurt toward the light when surrounding canopy trees die. It survives in the wild in the form of root systems and stump sprouts. He understood that on his slow march toward his heavenly reward, he would spend as many years as possible growing and backcrossing the American with the Chinese chestnut . The American chestnut (Castanea dentata) is a large, monoecious deciduous tree of the beech family native to eastern North America. It was some hundred years ago that these chestnut trees dominated the forested hills and mountains. Fax: 202.737.2457 A Purdue University study shows that the growth rate, size and longevity of chestnuts let them store more carbon, and at a faster rate, than any other hardwood. Tennessee. Because it was one of the largest trees in eastern forests, it earned the title of “mighty giant." It is the only species of chestnut native to Canada. 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