Foundation Aims to Bring Back A Thoroughly American Tree

As a boy growing up during the Depression, with a natural curiosity about the world, Terry Gulick liked to explore the fields and woods around his family's home in Springfield, Vt. By the time he was 11, in 1945, he could identify nearly every tree in the vicinity, except one.

http://www.vnews.com/11272010/7353411.htm                               Published 11/27/2010         Foundation Aims to Bring Back A Thoroughly American Tree         By Nicola Smith Valley News Staff Writer         As a boy growing up during the Depression, with a natural curiosity about the world, Terry Gulick liked to explore the fields and woods around his family's home in Springfield, Vt. By the time he was 11, in 1945, he could identify nearly every tree in the vicinity, except one.         “I went into an area and here was a tree I'd never seen the leaf of before,” he said. The leaf was about five inches long and oval, with distinctive saw-teeth; it was impressive-looking. When he checked a tree identification book, the only match that made sense was the American chestnut. However, by the 1940s, the chestnut had been all but wiped out as the result of a devastating fungus that had been introduced to the U.S. in the 1890s.         Puzzled, he told a county forester about the tree he'd found. After the forester quizzed him, he told Gulick that, yes, he had stumbled on an American chestnut. But even though it was leafing out and looked healthy, the forester said, it would probably be gone within a year. “Sure enough, next year it was dead,” said Gulick.         Once he'd identified one American chestnut, he began to notice other clusters of the tree in the neighborhood, all of them showing, despite new growth at their bases, the same signs of blistering bark. Still, that early exposure was enough to make resurrecting the chestnut a lifelong pursuit for Gulick, who is a volunteer for the Vermont and New Hampshire chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation.         “I'm very excited to be still alive and working, in my way, on it,” said Gulick.         Founded in the early 1980s, the foundation was originally located in Bennington. It is now located in Asheville, N.C, and has a research station in Virginia. With 16 state volunteer chapters, the foundation hopes to restore a re-invigorated American chestnut to its natural range in the eastern United States.         For nearly 30 years, its scientists have worked to develop a blight-resistant strain of the American chestnut by crossing the Chinese chestnut with the American over six generations of trees, reducing the Chinese strain over each generation, a process called back-crossing. What the foundation aims for is a sixth generation of trees that are 1/16 Chinese and the rest American.         “It's not a short-term project,” said Kendra Gurney, the New England regional science coordinator for the foundation. “We think that the genetic theory we built the program on is pretty solid. But only the long term will determine how well these trees perform.”         Long term, in this case, could mean at least two human generations. “It could be 50 years before we know whether the trees we're producing have the timber form to compete with other hardwoods,” said Gurney         Until its decimation, the American chestnut was one of the reigning queens of the eastern forest. Its range stretched from northern Georgia and Alabama in the South up the Appalachian chain to Vermont and New Hampshire. It went as far west as Ohio, and as far east as the southern Maine coast. It was dominant in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. Flowering in late June and early July, the chestnut's cascading, snowy blossoms turned the summer hillsides into blizzards of white.         Its timber was valued because of its hardiness and resistance to rot; its wood, its chestnuts and the honey that came from its flowers were cash crops for families in Appalachia. The nuts were an important food source for wildlife. It could grow to 100 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter. It might take two men, using a two-person saw, a week to cut down one of these giants that had stood for centuries, Gulick said.         But at the turn of the last century, a fungus that probably came in on Chinese chestnuts imported for ornamental use on Long Island's wealthy summer estates began attacking the native tree. The blight was identified in 1904, and efforts to save the chestnut began immediately, but with no resistance to the fungus, the American chestnut began a massive die-off.         Grace Spencer Knight, president of the Vermont and New Hampshire chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, describes the blight as “marching 50 miles a year in concentric circles” from the infection point in the New York area. By the 1930s, the American chestnut, with a few intermittent clusters, had been eradicated. As a devastating corollary, the economies that had grown up in Appalachia around the tree were also wiped out just as the Depression took hold. Unhappy story, unhappy ending, another species lost.         Well, not necessarily. In fact, there are small pockets of surviving American chestnuts, and every year brings reports of lone wild American chestnuts still standing in woodlands or on people's properties. There are two giant American chestnuts in Berlin, Vt., for example. “We do find lucky trees,” said Gurney. “If they're flowering and accessible, those are trees we can use in our breeding program.”         Why some trees withstood the blight, or perhaps were never exposed to the blight, is cause for speculation. One theory, said Gurney, is that at the northern end of the range, in Vermont and New Hampshire, the cold, or the shorter growing season, may have inhibited the blight.          Another theory is that, because there were not as many American chestnuts here to begin with, the blight didn't have the same impact that it had in the Middle Atlantic states. The same holds true for the southern end. “We tend to find the bigger specimens that have avoided infection at the extremes of the range,” Gurney said.         Because of these genetic outliers, and because even a diseased chestnut tends to grow back from the roots and can attain an age of 12 to 15 years, there is root stock that can be used for research. Now volunteers throughout the East are planting hybrid seedlings that are thought to have resistance and were developed by the American Chestnut Foundation.         Four years ago, Grace Spencer Knight and her husband, Randy, started a chestnut orchard on their property in Perkinsville, Vt. Although they suffered losses because of drought and rodents, the couple can now count 368 viable, fourth-generation American chestnuts. These trees will be innoculated with the fungus, and evaluated one year later to see whether they were able to resist it. Those trees that have the tell-tale blistering will be chopped down and burned; those trees that show signs of scarring and healing will be kept for breeding.         “A lot of things are controversial,” said Spencer Knight. “Should we restore the wolf? Should we restore the panther? With the American chestnut, there is no losing side. No one says, wow, that was a bad tree, we should never bring that back.”         Randy Knight, a Southerner who spent summers with his grandparents in Virginia, is not old enough to remember the chestnut, but his grandparents and an aunt did, and told him about the days when chestnut burrs were knee high in the woods and hogs were turned loose to gorge on the nuts, fattening up nicely for the hams they would become.         At Gulick's Springfield home, the yard is littered with the usual fall debris: sticks, twigs, leaves, weeds. But unusually, it is also scattered with spiny chestnut burrs. He has four maturing American chestnuts that grew because he bought a tree from a research station in Connecticut about 20 years ago (not affiliated with the American Chestnut Foundation) and began his own unofficial breeding program.         It has been a long wait, but this fall, Gulick saw a high number of squirrels running back and forth among his chestnuts. Wait a minute, they're not just playing games out there, he recalled saying to himself. When he checked under the trees, he was excited to see hundreds of nuts there for the taking.         “The squirrels and I fought over getting the chestnuts. Sometimes they won, sometimes I did,” Gulick said.         He collected enough chestnuts, 25 pounds in all, to sell a portion of them to Stern's Produce in White River Junction. The rest he is keeping for eating, and for planting. He shows off some of the burrs and the shells, glossy, round and brown. After making incisions in the shells, he pops three in a toaster oven for roasting. An aroma reminiscent of nutmeg begins to waft about. Five minutes later, he takes the nuts out of the oven and offers them up. The meat inside has a taste unlike any other: dense, fragrant and honeyed sweet.         Gulick is enthusiastic about the possible return of the American chestnut, but he concedes that, by the time the experiment has been judged successful, or not, he will be, in his words “dirt-napping over millennia.”         “Biologic systems are complicated,” said Randy Knight, looking out over the chestnut orchard at his home. “You have to be patient and be able to accept failure.”         But failure is not, of course, the preferred outcome. “To bring it back would be a boon to hunters and wildlife. I'm definitely doing this for my grandchildren,” said Spencer Knight.