Redwood Reader

I belonged to The American Chestnut Foundation in its early years when I lived in New York. The story of the chestnut can teach us many things, and may yet make a comeback with human assistance. I was always of the opinion that, since the infection entered the bark as it began furrowing in spring from new growth as it ages, it should be possible to genetically modify the tree not to furrow, or at least cause it to delay years into the future allowing for annual cropping and plentiful wood and glomalin production. The hybrids cannot replace the precipitation and root zone activity of a tree three or four times their size. There may be much to share with SOD researchers as investigations continue.
Chestnuts are one of the great economic opportunities to agroforesters. The long lived trees commercially cover only 400 plus acres in the U.S., all in California. Yet they represent a large swath of wealth acrosws Southern Europe form Portugal to the Balkans with the crop harvested by hogs and turned into pork. Together with olives this culture has existed for thousands of years and provided annual income and a stable landscape the entire time. Today they would probably be grown in walnut fashion because good use of mountain agriculture continues to defy machinery. Instead a pastoral model is needed, such as harvesting with hogs. The very methods of old time gully fighting annual mast crop agriculture constitute good glomalin management. Indeed, PL was founded on a loan guaranteed by hogs eating acorns under an oak tree. Chestnut is also a tough and durable wood with similar weather resistance qualities to redwood, and sells for over twelve dollars a board foot.
Early HUmboldt settlers brought chestnuts with them and planted them with success. I have heard of quite a few trees but all the ones I see have been claimed to be American but are too small in the tree and too large in the nut. NEvertheless they grow well here. When I first moved here I wondered if it woould be worth growing seed trees but the emphasis at the time was hybrids that could survive in the infected regions. Later discussions with Bear creek Nursery indicated the climate needs to be hot and moist for the blight to spread naturally, and that we only have cold and wet and hot and dry. So even if a tree does get infected it won't be virulent enough to spread to other trees or escape across the landscape.
At any rate, tanoak is halfway between oaks and chestnuts but it remains to be reported whether or how susceptible chestnut is to SOD, or tanoak to blight, which is very closely related to SOD. The prophalytic action of truffles on certain decaying fungi like fomes that eats Douglas fir may also yield new secrets from the forest subsoils. We cannot stress how much still needs to be learned.
American_Chestnut_Trees_and_Hybrids@yahoogroups.com Number 80
Message: 1 Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 13:00:25 -0000 From: "John Klinkel" > Subject: Still growable? Hi, I am new to the group but damn glad to be a part of it! I have always been fascinated by Chestnut trees and I have also wanted to know; if one were to very carefully manage a small acreage in the former range of these mighty trees, would it be possible to grow saplings and raise them to maturity, or is Chestnut blight simply to pervasive and widespread at this point? Thanks!!--John. ________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ Message: 2 Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 09:01:49 -0500 From: "Thomas M. Pugel" > Subject: Re: Still growable? John, It would not be possible to grow American chestnut trees to mature trees but a good number of them will grow long enough to produce seeds. This is an important part of the efforts to breed blight resistant trees. The American germplasm will be needed for breeding for decades to come. I would encourage you to grow an American orchard. Tom Pugel
Hi, John, The blight is still out there. If you are within the former range, odds are your local woodlands still contain live rootstock which keeps sending up shoots which survive some number of years, and then are hit by blight again. However, don't give up. There is a group which has been breeding pure American Chestnut stock for blight resistance, and they've been making good headway. They are called the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation or ACCF (). Years back, they started colecting material from the many scattered "survivor trees" - pure American Chestnuts that contracted blight, but fought it off. These trees exist, but are so scattered that they could not cross-polinate and reproduce on their own. In crossing these trees, they were recently getting about one in ten with blight resistance (which is the ability to form a raised, non-lethal canker, rather than the normal sunken one that kills the tree). A couple of years ago thinned their orchards of the trees that didn't seem to be effectively transmitting resistance, and are hoping to get much better rates of resistance out of the current nut crops. (You can get nuts or seedlings from them.) One of their growers, or "cooperators" (that's what you'll be if you participate) turned up a tree - in his first batch of seedlings! - that has displayed an unheard of level of blight resistance, fighting off blight for the first time when it was pencil-thin. Even the Asians usually die when they contract blight that young, but this tree has thrived and grown vigorously. (Look at , and .) Anyway, a fully blight resistance pure American Chestnut seems within reach, and your assistance can help make it happen. (And also make you the first on your block with full-sized American Chestnuts! :-) There is another group that has been working to restore the chestnut, namely The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF). They are much better known than ACCF . However, they are using quite a different approach to achieve the same goal. They are outcrossing to Asians, then repeatedly crossing back to Americans with an eye to retaining blight resistance but getting all other American traits. I think that, given that the ACCF approach promises to be successful, it is preferable to the TACF one. Aside from lingering concerns about the potential for "throwback" Asian traits cropping up in TACF trees (which they deny can happen, and I'm not qualified to comment on), I expect that their trees will face some legal barriers in future restoration work on public lands in that their legal status as a native tree will be open to question. The ACCF trees will not face such obstacles, nor will there be any reason for concern, justified or not, that non-American traits might appear down the road. Anyway, take a look at the ACCF site and let us know what you think! Good luck, Jill
Message: 1 Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 23:02:03 GMT From: "alan_drake@juno.com " > Subject: Re: Digest Number 80 There is a third way. Genetic engineering. The State Unviersity of NY has already created a blight resistance American elm. They are taking a gene from wheat that reacts strongly to cankers and emits hydrogen peroxide (promoting callus growth). So far, two nuts and one tree (nuts & tree with different techniques). They hope to add additional genes as well. This gene is expected to be dominant so half of the offspring of a single gene tree (and all of those from a doubel gene tree) will be blight resistant. An easy way to bring blight resistance into an existing, surviving population. Find a sapling, graft a blight resistance sprout onto it. Release it (cut down the competition) and wait a few years. Since chestnut is not self-fertile, the grafted branch will be teh dominant or only source of pollen. treat the tree for blight and get 4 or so nut crops. Repeat with the offspring and graft them into other trees. Soon, a 3/4 & 7/8 local tree. OR you can take my approach. I have arranged to ship 1,000 nuts from Upstate New York (Nyjk Jarvik in Old Norse/Icelandic) to Iceland. Prior shipments from Ontario (60) & Maine (120) have done quite well. Alan

Posted by: Rich McGuiness / 4:16 PM