1/18/2024 0 Comments Us chestnut trees![]() TACF believes these nuts will produce the last rung in the ladder: healthy American chestnut trees ready to be returned to the wild.īut while these achievements are commendable, it is the popular support behind the chestnut that is so heartening, a voluntary effort unifying all 20 states of the tree’s native range, from Maine to Alabama. After decades of gradual progress, chestnut trees that are 93% “American” are now growing in TACF orchards, and nuts will soon be harvested from the healthiest among them. More than 70,000 chestnut hybrids have been cultivated in Meadowview’s test fields, all systematically inoculated with blight to measure resistance. Funded through philanthropic donations, TACF’s breeding programme in Meadowview, southwest Virginia, hybridises the American with the Chinese chestnut species, “backcrossing” subsequent generations to breed out all Chinese attributes, while retaining its resilience to blight. Since the early 80s, the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) has conducted extensive research into America’s missing tree. Encouraged by news of America’s recovering chestnut, I visited the country’s captivating eastern woods to learn more about how to save a species. In 2012, the spread of ash dieback – a fungal disease carried in on nursery stock from continental Europe – sparked nationwide alarm. Native species including the black poplar, common juniper and many types of whitebeam are worryingly scarce, the result of disease, deforestation and overgrazing. Like the US, the UK has no shortage of threatened trees. ![]() Thankfully, however, the story did not end there: following a monumental conservational effort, the chestnut now stands on the brink of return. Infection swept north and south, and by the 1950s the great “redwood of the east” – whose fruit was relied upon by herbivores such as the wild turkey, bluejay and red squirrel – all but vanished, a tragedy considered one of the greatest ecological disasters to hit the world’s forests. The blight arrived in 1904, on ornamental Japanese chestnut trees imported to furnish New York’s expanding Bronx zoo. A broadleaf of immense size and distribution, the chestnut suffered catastrophic decimation by the inadvertent introduction of an Asian blight, Cryphonectria parasitica. Just under a century ago, the American chestnut disappeared from the vast eastern forests of the US. When I visited last autumn, these woods would have been littered with fallen nuts from the magnificent American chestnut ( Castanea dentata) – but for the blight that erased 4 billion trees from the landscape. ![]() It is deep-gorge and clear-river country, where an understory of vibrant dogwood gives way to an imposing hemlock, a tulip tree or an exhilarating view. Chestnut country once occupied some of the most spectacular wooded landscapes in the world, from the Shenandoah valley and the Catskills to Tennessee’s Smoky mountains. If you move south through the US Appalachian region, between New York and Georgia, you get a feel for what Bill Bryson described in A Walk In The Woods as “mile after endless mile of dark, deep, silent woods”.
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