Chestnut

Chestnut comeback(2)

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• published: 11 Jun 2016
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"Fungicides don;t work very well. If they worked we would use them, but the really dont." "The fungus is inside, it is under the bark," he said. "So if you spray the bark you are not even getting in where the fungus is." "Chestnut trees, because of their anatomy -- the way their vascular system works -- if you inject the tree you damage it. They are just not treatable that way." He said one tree can be treated with surgery and close care. "We are talking about ecosystem restoration" he said. "We need a tree that can survive and reproduce on its own under natural conditions." "We are hoping to be able to release these trees into the woods in a way that allows natural selection to take over," he said. "We are going to give them enough blight resistance to survive and reproduce. So how do we measure ultimate success? Within my lifetime I think we will have initiated those plantings." "A hundred or two hundred years from now, I think we will be able to measure success in another way -- if we have naturally reproducing populations of chestnut trees in the forest." Contact the American Chestnut Foundation if you think you have an adult American chestnut tree. Craddock said he gets calls from people a lot who claim they have an American chestnut and it turns out to be a Chinese. "The Chinese chestnuts are very popular. There was a lot of nostalgia for chestnuts in the 1940s and 1950s. The TVA distributed them by the hundreds of thousands. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted them. Today there are millions of Chinese chestnut trees in Tennessee." "if it is a large tree in a yard or near a farm, it is probably a Chinese chestnut." "Chinese chestnuts are very common. An American chestnut with a blooming stem is very, very rare in Tennessee." "We do find them. We find them in clear-cuts and on roadsides and abondoned farmsteads sometimes. But they are very, very rare." "American chestnut can persist in the forest as a stump sprout, but they will never bloom. But after a timber harvest and releaed into full sun, they will grow very very quickly. Within four or five years after release they will bloom and produce nuts." That is right about the time they start getting blight. "We can harvest nuts and collect pollen and breed those trees," he said." "That's right about the time they get blight. By year five, six and seven, they all have blight. By year eight nine and ten, they are all dead." they will revert to an "understory shrub" under the forest canopy. "We see areas Chestnut blight came through Tennessee in the 1930s. ACF.org large-scale planting -- like introducing them into surface mine relamation projects.