Chestnut restoration may bring happy ending to epic story

RELEASE: Aug. 31, 2007 – Volume XXXVII, No. 35

It’s an environmental story with mythological overtones: At 110-feet tall and eight to ten feet in diameter, the only trees bigger than American chestnuts in the United States are sequoias and redwoods. And despite their great height and girth, the mighty chestnuts were brought down by a microscopic fungus. Today, efforts to restore these tree giants to their former greatness rely on an unproven alliance with Chinese chestnuts, the very trees that we think may have introduced the fungus in the first place!

American chestnut trees once dominated forests from New England to the South and as far west as the Ohio Valley. In the heart of their range – including many areas in New Jersey – a quarter of the hardwoods were probably chestnut trees.

And chestnuts were used for much more than roasting over open fires. During lean winter months, the nuts were part of the diet of rural families and livestock. The straight, branch-free trunks produced ideal lumber that was lighter and easier to work than oak, and as rot resistant as redwood. Telegraph poles, musical instruments, floors and furniture were crafted from valuable chestnut lumber.

But in a textbook case of what can happen when foreign plants are introduced into an ecosystem, the American chestnut was virtually wiped out in the 1800’s. Plants imported from Asia carried a blight fungus. Chestnut blight first appeared in 1904 in New York City. By 1950, almost 4 billion trees were dead and the sixty-thousand year-old history of the American chestnut was almost over. Today, with few exceptions, you’ll see nothing more than stumps and remains of these once mighty trees, like the cracked and shattered foundations of a great, long-lost civilization.
But a dedicated group of people are working to see these trees rise again. By breeding the blight-resistant gene of Chinese chestnut trees into trees that will ultimately be 15/16ths American chestnut, the hope is to produce trees with the size and other natural traits of the American chestnut, but with blight resistance equal to that of the original Chinese parent.

The idea to crossbreed the two trees dates back to 1970, but the time and effort to develop a successful hybrid is expected to take six to eight generations of seeds. The first sixth-generation seeds were recently planted at an American chestnut research farm in Virginia, but scientists will have to wait about three years to find out if they are blight-resistant. Even then only 1 in 64 trees are expected be fully blight resistant.

In New Jersey, three chestnut experimental blight-resistant plantings are underway, including one in New Jersey Conservation Foundation’s Wickecheoke Creek Greenway project area in Hunterdon County. Theses trees are about 4 years old, and come from fourth generation seeds of the crossbreeding program. Rob Summersgill has 2 chestnut tree plantations, one at Mount Paul Park in Chester and the other at Schooley’s Mountain Park near Long Valley, through the American Chestnut Foundation’s work. However, other groups are also working on American chestnuts. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is working with Monmouth County Parks using plantings cultivated at the Bayside Correctional Facility.

No one can say for sure if these restoration efforts will succeed, but the return of the mighty and spreading American chestnut would be welcome in our New Jersey’s forests.

To play a part in the restoration project, and learn more, contact the American Chestnut Foundation at www.acf.org or 802-447-0110. Rob Summersgill is ACF’s New Jersey contact, at 908-647-5864 or rgsummersgill@juno.com.

If you have any questions about NJCF’s role in the restoration project, I hope you’ll contact me at info@njconservation.org. And please visit NJCF’s website at www.njconservation.org, for more information about conserving New Jersey’s precious land and natural resources.

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