Chestnuts

https://pixabay.com/photos/chesnut-autumn-seasonal-prickly-6810423/

There are many places to read the story… once upon a time, our eastern woods were thick with chestnut trees that dropped their bounty each year to the delight of man and beast. Then, in our usual way, settlers messed it all up - by bringing a literal blight to to the continent. Specifically, the chestnut blight, a fungus which infects members of the chestnut family, and kills the American chestnut in most cases.

As it spread through the Eastern US, timber companies follows and, in some cases, raced ahead trying to limits its spread, all to no avail. some trees do have resistance, but they are few and far between. The american Chestnut became very nearly extinct.

However, a few brave souls (actually quite a large number of brave souls) have poured time and energy into finding those few survivors and crossing them with the (far more resistant) Chinese Chestnut.

The challenge with this strategy was that the Chinese chestnut is a very different tree from the American. It has different growth habits, being much shorter and bushier than its 100 foot tall endangered cousin. Unlike that cousin, it does not thrive in the American woodland. So over the last several decades, the American chestnut society has continued to make crosses and backcrosses in an effort to create a tree that is resistant to the blight, yet has the essential characteristics of the American chestnut.

In recent years, although their work continues, they have begun giving out chestnut seedlings that have at least some resistance to the blight, along with a hopefully American growth habit. And we scored 3!

Of course, they aren’t quite 100 feet tall yet….

Give them a few years!

We planted them in the wooded area, in well drained sandy soil. Of course, even though they like the woods, seedlings need light to grow. So, we went for spaces with a lot of small saplings, which we mostly cleared. Smaller trees means that enough light is reaching the canopy floor. Of course, in one case I thought a little extra light might help…. plus, this tree was too close to the next one over

So here they wait, protected against deer and tucked in for spring!