American Chestnut Tree

I think I found an American Chestnut Tree out by where I live and work. It looks in healthy shape. I've contacted the ACNO and am sending them some leaves soon as well as getting pictures. If this is really an ACN it will be a rare find east of the Mississippi. It's a young one about 4 inch diameter and about 35 feet tall maybe even 40 feet. More details will follow this week.

Are you in a position to post photos? Several close ups of the leaves and bark would be good as well as a few photos of the actual tree. Great find! We've got some American Elms still standing that are not diseased. Sadly, no American Chestnuts anywhere that I've seen.

It's entirely possible. American chestnut sometimes grows up to about that size before the blight knocks it back, and it can bear seeds when it's that small also (if it has cross-pollination). The fungus spores seem to need an open wound or at least some rough bark to gain purchase, and smooth-barked young chestnuts may avoid it until they are wounded or begin to develop bark texture. Even then, it only dies back to the root collar and will sprout back.

Guy S.

I just ordered an american chestnut from coldstream farm. It is something I am going to experiment with. There are no other chestnuts nearby so it should be well isolated. I'll just have to wait and see what happens.

escambiaguy, the fact that there's no chestnut trees in your area will not alleviate the presence of chestnut blight fungus. Post Oak(Quercus stellata) is also commonly attacked by CFB. Although the disease is seldom fatal to Post Oak, it will be a 'donor' of the blight to eventually attack your American Chestnut. "Good Luck"

Conifer, you can expand the list of hosts for the fungus to include many of the Red Oak clan. I know where there is a Chestnut that is a grand old tree (lots of others know it too) not far from Forest Hill, MD. The nuts are harvested and grown each year, but so far all the seedlings succumb to blight when older. I forget which org gets the nuts, maybe the one in VA?

Here are a couple pictures of the dried chestnut tree leaves. They are the length of the book I get from a club I belong to.

Another picture here

Interesting news recently:

Rare American Chestnut Trees Discovered

ALBANY, Ga. - A stand of American chestnut trees that somehow escaped a blight that killed off nearly all their kind in the early 1900s has been discovered along a hiking trail not far from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Little White House at Warm Springs.

The find has stirred excitement among those working to restore the American chestnut, and raised hopes that scientists might be able to use the pollen to breed hardier chestnut trees.

"There's something about this place that has allowed them to endure the blight," said Nathan Klaus, a biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources who spotted the trees. "It's either that these trees are able to resist the blight, which is unlikely, or Pine Mountain has something unique that is giving these trees resistance."

Experts say it could be that the chestnuts have less competition from other trees along the dry, rocky ridge. The fungus that causes the blight thrives in a moist environment.

The largest of the half-dozen or so trees is about 40 feet tall and 20 to 30 years old, and is believed to be the southernmost American chestnut discovered so far that is capable of flowering and producing nuts.

"This is a terrific find," said David Keehn, president of the Georgia chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation. "A tree of this size is one in a million."

The rugged area known as Pine Mountain is at the southern end of the Appalachians near Warm Springs, where Roosevelt built a home and sought treatment after he was stricken with polio in 1921.

"FDR may have roasted some chestnuts on his fire for Christmas or enjoyed their blooms in the spring," Klaus said.

The chestnut foundation may use pollen from the tree in a breeding program aimed at restoring the population with blight-resistant trees.

"When the flowers are right, we're going to rush down and pollinate the flowers, collect the seeds a few weeks later and collect the nuts," Klaus said. "If we ever find a genetic solution to the chestnut blight, genes from that tree will find their way into those trees."

The chestnut foundation has been working for about 15 years to develop a blight-resistant variety. The goal is to infuse the American chestnut with the blight-resistant genes of the Chinese chestnut.

American chestnuts once made up about 25 percent of the forests in the eastern United States, with an estimated 4 billion trees from Maine to Mississippi and Florida.

The trees helped satisfy demand for roasted chestnuts, and their rot-resistant wood was used to make fence posts, utility poles, barns, homes, furniture and musical instruments.

Then these magnificent hardwoods, which could grow to a height of 100 feet and a diameter of 8 feet or more, were almost entirely wiped out by a fast-spreading fungus discovered in 1904.

"There are no chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and if they are, they're Chinese," Keehn said.

Way to go gardening101usa! Excellent post. I love reading news like this!

I have the Timburr Chestnut as well as several other blight resistant hybrids from Oikos Tree Farms. I am very happy with them. They fill a niche.

Equilibrium, I sent you a D-mail on the Timburr.

I just checked my D-Mail and there's nothing there. Please try again.

Definitely a chestnut, but whether it is Castanea dentata or not, I'm less sure.

Those leaves could just as easily have come from any of the many Castanea sativa (Sweet Chestnut, from Europe) I see around here. What little I've seen of C. dentata usually has proportionally shorter, broader leaves with more widely spaced serration, but I've not seen much so that may not always apply.

Then there's also C. mollissima and C. crenata, and all the various hybrids derived from them that have been raised to try to breed blight resistance into C. dentata - some of the hybrids are probably impossible to identify without DNA testing.

Resin

(edited for typo repair)


This message was edited Jul 11, 2006 9:52 AM

Right, at a 15/16 ration, I'm sure DNA is the only way to know. I am getting more and more interested in the American chestnut and the work both chestnut foundations are doing the more I become acquainted with the subject.

Scott