Don’t get discouraged Eric. Keep going; stay in foundation and find a good resistant chestnut. I’ll plant some
It’s amazing how many I’ve found since June (hundreds of individual trees). Today I found one of the tallest wild American Chestnuts I’ve seen yet. This one is well over 20 feet tall, with the bark starting to take on that more mature furrowed look. No sign of blight on it yet and it’s growing in good sun within a clearing in the woods.
This one was about 30 yards away. It looked like it was growing well too but the trunk got snapped near the base. Since then it’s sprouted more limbs in its quest for survival.
I was out in the rain today picking wild cherries in a park and found a Chinese chestnut with a few burs on it. I don’t know if there’s any viable seed inside since the only other Chestnut I saw nearby was too young to flower, but I’ll check back in the fall. Still it’s fun to be able to spot them when I’m not even looking.
One more for the 20 foot + club. It’s always good to find ones that are larger than shrub size. This one was up on a hillside along with at least a couple dozen more, this one being the largest. No sign of blight yet so maybe if all goes well, it might produce a few burs within a couple years. Tropical storm Isaias last year opened up the canopy so this grove has a small chance of producing some viable seed.
It’s the leaves that stand out to me the most, and the catkins in June. Admittedly I’ve pulled my truck over excitedly, running into the woods only to find a Beech or Chestnut Oak. I think in the winter they’ll be a lot harder to spot unless I was right on top of them.
In my case its looking for firewood! I enjoy your enthusiasm Eric. Its contagious! I mean not like locust mania contagious, but contagious!
This is one for the books. I can’t even see the top of the canopy. 14” DBH estimated. What a discovery!
Lol I think not. Looking at the CT Champion tree site, I still have to measure this one but it could possibly be larger than the largest documented one (which is in Hamden IIRC)
This just keeps getting better and better. Upon another trip to the large chestnut I found a second one less than 50 feet away, this one about 8” DBH. I didn’t see it before because it was hiding behind a sassafras. Chances are very high these trees are producing viable seed!
Nice discovery in my old stomping grounds. If I had to guess, there’s a grove of chestnuts covering an area of just over an acre on a hilltop. 10 years ago there was a forest fire there that wiped out most of the large oaks. I hiked up there this afternoon and bingo. Not only are they coming back to life, some are flowering and loaded with burs. It’s hard to tell but if you look closely you can see the spikey tennis balls up towards the top of the trees.
He became interested once again when I sent him pictures of the large trees. He (supposedly) wants to meet up with me in a couple weeks, and he plans on bringing another foundation member along.
I’m pretty sure they have put all their eggs in the hybrid basket, so make sure they don’t have backpack sprayers full of brush killer when you show them your discoveries.
Genetically modified… but they’re hoping to get parent trees established now so that pollination will occur with the GMO chestnut. Hybrids (Dunstan and others) have their place, but the American Chestnut Foundation is working to get Americans back as a functional species.
There’s a lot of conflicting information out there. One source I read basically said the back crossing method wasn’t going to work because it was near impossible to retain all of the blight resistance genes from Asian chestnuts. The idea that you could have a 15/16 American/Chinese blight resistant tree with the American timber form and ability to compete in our forests seemed a little too ambitious. The genetically engineered chestnut they were developing looked even more promising but with that came FDA-government red tape issues so that’s still in limbo. In my personal uneducated opinion I think the path forward is to find as many surviving wild chestnuts as possible that have some degree of natural blight resistance and breed the heck out of them. Gather pollen from true American Chestnuts from all over, and keep crossing survivor tree genes. From my emails with the Connecticut President of TACF, he’s very interested in collecting viable seed from wild trees. The majority of persisting trees don’t live long enough to flower, and the likelihood that there’s at least two flowering trees at the same time in the same area is even slimmer.
The transgenic (GMO) trees will work. The approval process is progressing slowly… but it’s still progressing. Yes to finding parent trees, though. It’s the jumpstart needed.
Do you know if American Chestnuts are Monoecious or Dioecious? Is there a male and female tree, or are they self pollinating? I planted a few several years ago, but they didn’t survive. They were supposedly propagated from blight resistant trees. It’s amazing you have found so many in the wild. Hopefully they evolve to have blight resistance.
