Bid to save chestnuts under way
Blight-resistant varieties sought
By JOHN LUCAS Courier & Press Western Kentucky bureau (270) 333-4899 or jlucas@evansville.net
GOLDEN POND, Ky. - After an absence
of a half century or longer, the American chestnut tree is growing again
in the Land Between the Lakes. Rows of pencil-sized seedlings - planted by
volunteers and U.S. Forest Service staff over the past couple of weeks -
spread across a small hillside meadow not far from LBL's Nature Station.
The seedlings, most of which are about
three feet tall, are protected by a circle of black plastic mulch and 4-foot-high
rings of wire fence, meant to keep deer from grazing.
These are not your grandfather's chestnuts,
which once accounted for nearly a fourth of all forest trees growing throughout
the Appalachian range from Maine to Georgia.
Those are dead - wiped out by a fungal
blight that swept across the eastern half of the country during the first
half of the 20th century. And most of these seedlings, part of a chestnut
blight resistance study, will likely die within a few years from that same
blight.
LBL Forester John Donahue, who is coordinating
the project in conjunction with the nonprofit American Chestnut Cooperator's
Foundation, explains that maybe 10 to 15 of the approximately 200 seedlings
will survive to produce nuts.
Those are the ones researchers are
interested in - trees which demonstrate a natural resistance to the fungus.
Nuts from those trees will be planted,
more seedlings raised, more nuts harvested, more seedlings sprouted. Eventually,
they hope to produce an American chestnut that is resistant to the fungus.
A companion chestnut organization,
the American Chestnut Foundation, is using newer, gene-splicing technologies
to infuse blight resistant qualities of Asian trees into American stock.
If successful, they would then use
a process called backcross breeding to gradually reduce the influence of
the Asian cross and eventually produce an almost pure American tree with
disease resistant characteristics.
Participation in the blight resistance
study fits into the LBL's environmental education mission, Donahue said.
In addition to the larger planting of about 150 seedlings, smaller plantings
of about 20 each, with interpretive signs, will be made at the Nature Station
and at Brandon Springs, he said.
"There're probably folks not even aware
of this tree being part of the forest," he said, although older residents
of the area recall seeing the trees in their youth. At least one LBL employee
recalls cutting the dead chestnut snags for firewood, he said.
The American chestnut was regarded as the "redwood of the East."
Unlike the shrubby Chinese, or other
Asian varieties of chestnut grown in the U.S. today, the native American
chestnut was a fast, straight-growing tree. It routinely grew 100 feet tall
or higher and could be up to 10 feet in diameter. Its wood was lightweight,
easy to split and work, yet resistant to decay.
For the settlers of the continent,
it provided logs for homes and barns, rails for fences, wood for fires and
food for both human and animal consumption.
January 8, 2002