Redwood Reader

20. American chestnut may be poised for return
http://www.newsday.com/news/health/ny-chestnut0528,0,6579069,print.story?coll=ny-health-headlines
In the book Tree Crops by JR Smith he envisions an Institute of Mountain Agriculture where forests would be replanted with selected or grafted superior trees that yielded annual crops as an alternative to destructive logging practices. His twofold concern was erosion and annual income through improved trees. He was certain we are moving into a time of fewer wildernesses but more reforested lands being managed in a way we would call sustainable today. He gave many examples of this type of agriculture, practiced in many places but with a focus on drier areas. He showed the role of the hog in mast agriculture. He also showed plainly how trees were the key to preventing erosion. HE thought groups of people trained to graft superior nut trees would give farmers enough incentive to grow trees without resorting to cutting them. It is hard to remove the source of annual income, and timbering becomes less attractive. The owner can still harvest it on any given day anyway, so the wood in large producing trees is like money in the bank.
Poor hill folks had denuded the mountain lands for farming and wood products. After a few years the corn failed. More land got plowed. The first places eroded badly sliding into the lands below and being carved into gullies by running water. Smith hated gullies and noted successful defense and recoveries wherever he saw them. He also has some interesting ideas for retaining rainfall in the root zones of planted trees.
Many years of research may finally be paying off for the American chestnut as a forest tree. One hundred years ago this summer the chestnut blight Cryphonetria parasitica was first found at New York’s Bronx Zoo, probably hitching a ride on Asian chestnuts there. The disease spread quickly through the air, on birds, and in rain, killing 3.5 billion rtees by 1950. The 120 foot straight grained tree made up as much as much as a quarter of the Eastern hardwood forests before blight reduced them to stump sprouts that succumbed to the disease at the age when the bark begins to furrow. Decimated by blight in the first half of the century, standard breeding of resistant relatives or between survivors and new methods of inserting fungal resistance into the trees seems to be paying off. Introduction of an European virus is also being studied. Plenty to do but finally progress!
American chestnut grows straight clear rot resistant wood that could compete well with pressure treated wood. Chestnut fence posts were still good when I was in Shenandoah National Park in the ‘70’s, fifty years after the land had become park. Chestnut trees hybridized from resistant Chinese with American timber form should be available in 2006.
Chestnut trees are scattered throughout Humboldt County. I know of two in Eureka, some in Ettersburg, Cuneo Creek, and supposedly American chestnuts in Willow Creek. I say supposedly because most of the trees are not the American type but one of the other Castaneas, European, Japanese or Chinese. All these forms make larger nuts than American trees. Chestnuts are a 4 billion dollar industry worldwide but there is only one commercial farm in the US - and its here in California.
Speaking with Carlton Hanson of Bear Creek nursery in Washington several years ago, he told me chestnut blight did not do well in the West because it prefers warm moist summers. Ours are too hot and especially dry. Individual trees that showed signs of the disease fight through it, and it is not virulent enough to spread from tree to tree. With a half ton of nuts a year at a buck a pound and wood worth twelve dollars a board foot, there are opportunities.
Blighted species in the US include elm, butternut, white pine and Port Orford cedar. Most dendrology books list tanoak-Lithocarpus- as midway between oaks and chestnuts. There are some similarities between tanoak and chestnut that might be helpful for Sudden Oak Death. It would seem if we have success with one we might be able to apply it to the others.
I belonged to the American Chestnut Society in the seventies. In many ways it was similar to the restoration consciousness that arose around here. People were saying “Look what they’ve done to our beautiful forests. It is important to remember that a large number of healthy trees were cut once it looked like the trees were going to die. The disease made the wood worthless, so large scale cutting went on in order to get the wood while it was still good. Lots of erosion followed.
I think we what will learn about caring for trees as well as making better trees will lead to a greater ability to live sustainably in the mountains, and this in turn will lead to more people choosing a rural life that is in harmony with the systems that sustain life and culture. In a future article I will describe the mountain man of the future -the technopeasant.