Revitalizing Our Forests
THIS Christmas season, I am roasting chestnuts by the fire. American chestnuts, to be exact. These nuts, once widespread, were almost wiped out by a fungal blight. For a century, most of the chestnuts we eat, like the sweet Castanea sativa variety, have been imported from Europe and Asia.
And yet, I have been enjoying American chestnuts for several years now, harvested from some trees that are now part of my forest of 600 acres in western Maine. I planted four seedlings in the spring of 1982. Beyond all my expectations, the trees thrived, and some are now 35 feet tall. I never would have imagined such success; it was a Hail Mary shot in the dark to see if they might grow in the forest where they were once so common.
The American chestnut was once considered the “king of the eastern forest.” It was a dominant species from Maine to Mississippi, accounting for 25 to 30 percent of the hardwoods, with trees capable of growing to a hundred feet in height and almost 16 feet in diameter. Then in the late 1800s nuts of a similar tree were imported from Asia, and some spores of Cryphonectria parasitica, a fungus that produces oxalic acid, which poisons and kills the tree, were inadvertently introduced as well. The Asian trees were immune to it, but the American trees were not. The fungus was discovered in the Bronx in 1904 and by 1950, it had done most of its damage. An estimated four billion trees were swept from our forests within a half century, and the American chestnut essentially disappeared.
Fewer than a hundred were left in its former range, along with scattered survivors elsewhere in the country. I had purchased my seedlings from a breeder in Michigan, but have no way for knowing for sure whether they are the genuine article, Castanea dentate, or whether they were at some point interbred with an Asian chestnut to give them resistance to the blight. My hopes for these seedlings were not high. The chestnut blight fungus can also live in northern red oaks, though it does not kill them. These oaks are common in my woods, and there is some evidence that American chestnuts planted near northern oaks will catch the fungus and die. And plenty of the other trees in my forest show signs of fungal infections.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/21/opinion/revitalizing-our-forests.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0
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