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Student, Arborists Try to Restore Chestnut Forests
Last week, 15 Fauquier High students, while sloshing around in the rain, dug holes and planted almost 500 chestnuts in two large fields at Blandy Experimental Farm.
FHS teacher Susan Hilleary said that students in her natural resources class and the forestry team of the FFA spent four "very labor-intensive" hours planting the nuts.
When Mel Torme and Bob Wells wrote the lyrics “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” in the mid-40s, who knew that every tall American chestnut tree had been destroyed by blight 10 years earlier?
“Once, there were literally millions of American chestnut trees,” said Kathy Mayes, of the Chestnut Foundation headquartered in Marshall.
Now, the once populous tree is found as either shrub-like vegetation in the forest understory or offshoots of short stump sprouts. Years ago, Mayes said, chestnuts were “enormous, tall, straight trees.”
Native to Appalachia, the American chestnut existed up and down the East Coast from Maine to Georgia. Although the species is almost completely extinct, Mayes said the trees are easy to recognize with their unique flowers and dropped burrs.
The demise of the American chestnut occurred with the introduction of the Asian chestnut in the United States. The Asian chestnut can carry a fungal-spored blight, but the tree itself doesn't die. When the blight-carrying trees came to the U.S., their disease wiped out four billion American chestnut trees, which had made up 20 percent of America's forests.
“The blight didn't take off until the 20th century. By the mid-30s, every tall chestnut was gone,” Mayes said. “It was an ecological disaster. The American chestnut was an important tree for food and lumber.
"The chestnut is an amazing wood," she added. "Not only is it tall and straight, it is rot-resistant. Nothing has that kind of durability."
While the Asian chestnut is resistant to the blight it harbors, it is a smaller tree than the American species. When brought to America, it could not compete with taller oak and poplar trees in the U.S. forests, and therefore, didn't naturalize.
Researchers have developed a cross-breeding plan in which the favorable characteristics of each species will be incorporated to achieve a blight-resistant American chestnut. The process involves several phases and several years of backcrossing to regain a chestnut tree which is 15/16 American and 1/16 Asian. When the process is complete, it will take another 50 years to determine if the new American chestnut species will survive.
Since it will be our children and grandchildren who will see the success, Mayes said, "We really like to get young people involved. It is a long-term project."
"It was a lot more work than they were expecting," Hilleary said of her students' efforts. But many of her students told her they planned to come back to see the progress of their trees.
The agriculture teacher said revitalizing the chestnut tree "is such a big science project. It is a long-term initiative that will not come into fruition until these students are adults."
For more information, visit www.vatacf.org.
E-mail the reporter: afelts@timespapers.com.
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