Butternut Canker Wiping Out The Tree That Dyed Confederate Uniforms - NYT

[hatrack]

In the 29 years since a fungal disease known as butternut canker was first observed in southwest Wisconsin, it has infected over 90 percent of butternut trees throughout their native range from New Brunswick, Canada, to Georgia to Minnesota.

Dale Bergdahl, recently retired after 29 years as a University of Vermont forestry professor, has been tracking more than 100 butternut trees here in the University of Vermont’s Jericho Research Forest. Dr. Bergdahl was the first to find the canker in Vermont, near Snake Mountain, in the fall of 1983. Since then, it has killed half the butternuts in the state. The fungus, Sirococcus clavigignenti-juglandacearum, was described as a new species in 1979 and bears the earmarks of being recently introduced. But it has never been found outside North America.

Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight, also caused by fungi, were notorious, and much more conspicuous, because elms and chestnuts were abundant. Butternuts are little-known, however, and have always been sparsely distributed. But there is a growing effort to understand the disease. In mid-October, Dr. Bergdahl was among 40 scientists and foresters from the United States and Canada who met in Niagara Falls, Ontario, for the Butternut Canker Research Symposium.

Though many people have never heard of the butternut, the tree has a long and history of usefulness. Indians tapped it for syrup, used the bark for medicine and dye, and ate the hard-to-crack but tasty nuts raw or boiled them to produce a buttery vegetable oil. The Vikings of L’Anse aux Meadows gathered butternuts from points south and took them back to Newfoundland. Confederate soldiers used the husks to die their uniforms a golden brown (earning them the nickname butternuts). The rot-resistant wood, often called white walnut, is favored by some woodworkers. Butternuts are also important to wildlife: many mammals eat the nuts. The tree is closely related to the black walnut, and their ranges overlap, but walnuts range farther south and butternuts farther north. Like walnuts, butternuts are intolerant of shade and their roots exude a poison known as juglone to kill competing trees.

EDIT

http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=64320

[democrank]

1. Thanks for posting this.

About a decade ago I visited an old farmhouse that had kitchen walls made out of butternut planks. Some of the most beautiful wood I have ever seen.

[cali]

2. This makes me literally ill.

Butternut going out of the woods here. Not so long ago, it was healthy and plentiful. Vermont and the rest of the north woods are far more fragile and closer to collapse than most people know.