One morning this past May, on the second of our two annual point counts for the Bald Eagle Ridge Important Bird Area, I was pleased to run across a couple of these brown, porcupiney things in the middle of our Laurel Ridge Trail. American chestnut husks! We looked around for the tree of origin, but we were in a hurry, and I had to return the next day and find it. It wasn’t more than fifteen feet off the trail — a forty-foot-tall tree, to all appearances still healthy, about five inches in diameter at breast height. The ground around it was littered with the tell-tale husks.
The day before yesterday I went for another look. Despite the absence of obvious lesions on its bark, it clearly had the blight; all the leaves had turned brown with the exception of those on the new sprouts that were already clustered around its base. (You can see the lowest branch in the above photo; none of my photos of the crown of the tree were worth sharing.) Like every other American chestnut on our mountain — and well over 99.9 percent of all native chestnuts in the eastern United States — this individual will never again be able to grow an above-ground stem for more than a couple of decades before succumbing to the introduced Asian fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica.
But unlike most of the other spindly chestnuts on our ridges, this stem lived long enough to produce one crop of nuts before it died. There’s a slight — very slight — chance that they were fertile, cross-pollinated with some other rare tree that happened to flower in the spring of 2006 somewhere in the vicinity. And there’s an even slighter chance that one of those fertile nuts was spared by the squirrels and managed to sprout in a favorable location. Do you believe in miracles? But it is upon just such miracles — and/or the intervention of geneticists — that the future of this totemic species depends, because it is only through sexual reproduction that the American chestnut will be able to evolve resistance to the blight.
I know: you thought the purpose of sex was reproduction, didn’t you? But many plants can reproduce vegetatively, too; Castanea dentata is a great example. “King of the coppice,” biologist Joe Schibig calls it. Who knows how the hell old some of these ridgetop rootstocks might be? It’s eerie to stand among the twisted chestnut oaks and the mountain laurel (now also dying en masse due to a blight of unknown origin) and realize that 100 years ago, the woods here would have been dominated by straight, soaring trunks, and that 200 years ago — before the first clear-cutting of Plummer’s Hollow around 1815 — the forest primeval would’ve been an almost unimaginably full cornucopia, with a deep carpet of chestnut burrs every fall. Even on years when the acorn and hickory crops failed, chestnuts, having bloomed well after the last frost, were still available to fill the bellies of squirrels, deer, raccoons, mice, chipmunks, and a host of other creatures. Evolution called the vast flocks of passenger pigeons into existence in part as a response to this superabundance of chestnut mast. One out of every four trees in the Appalachians was an American chestnut. Its wood was straight-grained, easy to split, rock-hard, and virtually impervious to rot.
It’s a bit of an irony, I guess, that trees so resistant to the common agents of decay would fall victim to a fungus. First spotted at the Bronx Zoo in 1904, the airborne disease spread at a rate of about fifty miles a year, wiping out in excess of three billion trees over the next half-century. A half-century after that, what’s the prognosis for the species? As Schibig notes,
Some chestnuts have repeatedly died and sprouted again from their root collars for the past 70 years, but the vigor and number of these sprouts have been declining. After all, they can’t be expected to forever battle the blight, other diseases such as root rot, ravenous insects, browsing by deer, competition from other trees, unfavorable weather conditions and habitat destruction by humans. It was hoped that in some parts of its natural range there would be pockets of chestnuts that would have resistance to the disease and would be reproducing successfully from their nuts, not just by sprouting. To my knowledge, such populations, sometimes called the “holy grail” by American chestnut fans, have never been found. It appears that human intervention will be necessary to restore the American chestnut to the forests of the eastern U. S.
The remainder of Schibig’s brief essay describes the effort to resurrect the American chestnut. I’m most familiar with the efforts of the American Chestnut Foundation, whose quarter-century-long experiment began by crossing American chestnuts with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts, then crossing the resulting hybrids with more American Chestnuts, and so on: crossing each new generation with pure C. dentata stock until they get a tree that has all the attributes of an American chestnut, but with the disease resistance of its scrubbier East Asian ancestor. The main site for this research in Pennsylvania is at the Penn State Experimental Forest in Stone Valley, less than 25 miles away from our mountain as the pigeon flies.
The passenger pigeon and the American chestnut were almost certainly both examples of what ecologists call keystone species: species without which basic ecosystem functions such as carbon cycling and nutrient storage are fundamentally altered. Without a steady supply of chestnut mast, many wildlife populations have probably become a great deal more unstable, with repercussions up and down the food chain. Without passenger pigeons — which were on the way out well before the introduction of the chestnut blight, due to market hunting and widespread clear-cutting — our forests have lost a major, periodic source of fertilizer and a disturbance regime as natural and necessary as the once-in-a-century wildfire.
It’ll be great if the American Chestnut Foundation’s back-crossing scheme works and we can restore at least one of these two species. But in order to do so, we will also have to be mindful of a third keystone species: the white-tailed deer. Here in Plummer’s Hollow, as I’ve noted before, a number of years of good hunting have brought the deer herd down to reasonable levels, allowing a few of the chestnut sprouts to survive. But we can never quite relax: one year of poor hunting combined with a mild winter could change all that. Eternal vigilance, it seems, is the price not only of liberty but of healthy forests as well.
I know I will never see a fully mature American chestnut tree in my own lifetime — just as I will never see a large, old-growth mixed-deciduous landscape in the East outside of the Porcupine Mountains, way over on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. A recent article from the Christian Science Monitor on the American Chestnut Foundation’s research sounds a hopeful note, projecting enough nuts for a large-scale replanting effort to commence by 2015. Hope is good. But I do think a consciousness of just how much we’ve lost is also important if we really want to overcome public complacency and rally support for protecting and restoring what we have left.
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Hmmmm, I need to take a walk in a woods near here. I know of one grove of chestnut trees in a state game land near me.
Also, there is (was) a large tree in state college. Better then 2 feet in dia at the base. It was on the west side near the golf course. Along an alley I think.
You sure it was C. dentata? A 2-foot diameter tree would be almost unheard-of right now. Might’ve been the European species. There are a lot of exotics in and around the campus.
absolutely beautiful, well-thought post, Dave. that photo is gorgeous too. Makes me miss the east coast — Virginia to be more specific — where I spent most of my childhood before our dad uprooted the fam and emigrated to Canada — Vancouver to be specific. No chestnut trees to speak of in Montana, where I’ve lived for 30 years. I do miss them. And the other hardwood forest trees.
I’ve gotten a fair number of submissions for FOTT — working on it tonight, in fact. I’ll have it up by the 1st. Thanks for your post. It’s a doozy!
Having read Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer I can appreciate the sentiment of this post. The picture of the nut reminds me of the fruit of a very different vegetable, the local wild cucumber which drops off the vine in June or July in these parts. I have often found the husks empty of the four finger-thick seeds that run the length. Are as tasty as a chestnut to some forager?
“We can never quite relax.”
The Buddhist in me would recoil, if recoiling were a Buddhist thing. We can always relax, and in doing so become more nimble in our dance with change.
I want to appreciate the beauty of a world in which you are both right and wrong. A world where more people strive to protect the forests, but also where forests and species and life itself are just passing expressions of a larger force, as amenable to conservation as a breeze.
Thanks for a thoughtful and educational post!
Dave,
I have one half-decent sized chestnut tree in my woods that I’m keeping an eye on. It’s about the size of your tree. I haven’t seen any signs of blight on it yet–no nuts at the moment, though. Still, it’s in much better shape than most, and where would be without hope?
Carolyn h.
http://roundtoprumings.blogspot.com
I’m reminded of a recent trip to Lincoln Park in Chicago where we saw a mature American elm. The wind patterns off Lake Michigan have at least slowed the spread of Dutch elm disease there. On the Pentacrest of the University of Iowa there was a George Washington elm–grown from the stock at Mount Vernon. It’s gone, along with virtually every fully-grown American elm in the Midwest. But like your chestnut husks, the elm in Lincoln Park signifies hope that such beautiful trees might grace the countryside again.
I’ve heard the blight’s result described as turning the American chestnut from a tree to a woody shrub. In any case, the plant has already reached a basic accomodation with the fungus that allows it to keep reproducing. It might someday shake off the parasite anyhow, but at this point natural selection isn’t going to be in much of a hurry. If we want to see that species getting to full size again… well, it’s up to us. As (iirc) G. Harry Stine said, “we are as gods — it’s about time we started getting good at it.”
America’s been losing an awful lot of its large trees to various blights and infestations…. Eveything from Dutch Elm disease to the misnamed “sudden oak death”.
I tried to key out a tree that I noticed in an office park where I worked a couple of years ago (in Northern Virginia), but I was never confident that I had a C. dentata.
Hi Joel – I haven’t read that novel yet – sounds as if I should. I’m also only vaguely aware of the wild cucumber you describe (possibly from seeing a close-up at Paula’s House of Toast), so I’m afraid I can’t answer your question.
jarrett – Well, I think we’re talking about different kinds of relaxation – or not. I’ve never pretended to buy into Buddhist ideology. I do enjoy hearing these kinds of responses though. Thanks.
Carolyn – I hope your tree makes it a while longer. But as i said, sometimes they don’t show much sign of infection before they die.
Steve and David Harmon – I have a big dead elm on the other side of my front yard – just died last year. And ten feet closer to the house is the stump of my butternut tree, another victim of deadly fungus wiping out the species. Our beeches down in the hollow don’t have the beech bark disease yet, but they say it’s only a matter of time. Our flowering dogwoods are fewer and fewer every year due to dogwood anthracnose, and oh yeah, the hemlock woolly adelgids should finish off our hemlock trees over the next ten years. Emerald ash borer is now in PA, and we have a lot of white ashes here. So yeah, there are a lot of tree species on the way out.
David Gorsline – Thanks for stopping by. Yeah, so much of i.d.ing for non-experts like us is corroborated by the natural context. It’s hard to tell with a garden.
Wonderful post, I intend to add the American Chestnut to my list of keystone species when I teach that concept to my 8th graders this fall. Lets hope that the next few generations understand the unintented consequnces of our actions and possibly gets to see a few of these great trees.
Amen, Larry. Glad you liked the post, and thanks for stopping by.
[...] chestnut on Brush Mountain bears nuts Jump to Comments This past May, we discovered unmistakeable evidence that one of the American chestnut trees on topof Laurel Ridge had borne a crop of nuts the previous autumn. The tree was about fifteeen feet off the trail, and some 40 feet tall. It seemed to be still in good health, with no large lesions from the blight, but when I checked again this afternoon, its leaves were all brown — except for the four-foot-high sprouts at its base. Read more in my post at Via Negativa. [...]
[...] I have been taking down the living room floor, going back and forth with a short, heavy, and very loud dancing partner: a Silver Line sanding machine, fitted with a Baldor industrial motor that blew a couple of fuses yesterday morning before I plugged it into another circuit. The floor, which had been painted in a patchwork of colors and covered most recently by a tattered green carpet, is very soft and rough, and I’ve guessing it’s hemlock. A pine floor would be much more desirable for refinishing purposes, but part of me wants it to be hemlock, milled from trees that grew right here on the mountain, perhaps. In a few more years, all the mature hemlocks in the hollow will be dead, due to the woolly adelgid invasion, so the floor could serve as a memorial of sorts. It’s fitting, I suppose, because the all-but-vanished American chestnut is probably responsible for much of the exterior planking. This 150-year-old house is becoming haunted in a way few people would expect. __________ [...]