Eric, I am just north of Westfield and don't see any in my area on that map. I will definitely keep an eye out for larger trees. All of the ones I've found so far are pretty small averaging 5-15'. It makes sense about them needing a lot of sunlight as the only place I see them is along the road where it's been clear for years. Walking my acres, there are none in the thick of it.
The map only shows trees that people reported, and I don't think there are swarms of people both actively looking for Chestnuts and using TreeSnap. I'm willing to bet there are plenty in your area. It helps to know the history of wherever you're looking too. It would be of no use looking in younger forests that were abandoned fields from the mid 1900s, since the blight struck New England around 1910 onward. The trick is looking in places that you know were continually forested since at least the late 1800s. I read somewhere that the blight outright killed most Chestnuts over 9-10" diameter or so, so the surviving sprouts we see today are from the younger root systems (which in themselves are still 120+ years old!)
Eric, the other day when heading home from a few errands, I spotted what appears to be an older Chestnut with empty nut shells still hanging. There was traffic and my drive by zoomed in pics aren't great. I'm going to check it out again the next time I go by.
Nice tree. I believe that's either a Chinese or a Japanese Chestnut. The leaves look glossy on the top and the edges don't have pronounced serrations. Also the timber form with the sprawling limbs matches Asiatic Chestnut. Neat find regardless
Today was an exciting day for me. Back in the fall I stored a bunch of pure American chestnut nuts that I collected in a Tupperware container packed in sand for the winter, to stratify them. They started sprouting last month, and now the radicals (tail/root) are getting long. Per the American Chestnut Foundation growing guidelines, I got to work getting them in the ground by mid-March. I made a small nursery bed for them late last year, so it was a matter of filling it. I wanted to replicate natural conditions as much as possible so I went up into some hills where there are dozens of small surviving stump sprouts, and gathered several buckets of soil from the area. I put the sandy subsoil in the bottom of the bed, rich topsoil on top, and buried 30 something nuts, each about an inch down with the radical pointing downward. I then covered the bed with a wooden frame I made with hardware cloth to keep rodents and squirrels from digging up all my hard work. 4 of the nuts didn’t sprout so I’ll be eating them as a snack tomorrow. Why not? It’s not too often someone gets the chance to eat a real American chestnut.
Those nuts that didn’t sprout may still be viable if they passed the float test last fall. We sometimes have delayed radical growth.
They sunk so they should be viable… As a backup, in the fall I also directly sowed a bunch of Chinese and American nuts outside in separate pots too, so chances are I’ll have plenty more to work with. Curiosity has the best of me as far as trying these 4 as a snack
I read roasted is best. They’re supposed to sweeten up a lot after cooking. Germination rate was very high, even on the smaller nuts. Even if only half make it to being small trees, I’m still going to have way more trees than space to plant them at home. I’m going to have to do some rogue planting in the surviving groves around CT
Cool. I think of the Christmas carol "chestnuts roasting on an open fire" Nothing wrong with rogue planting. Heck we do enough rogue scrounging!
Time for a 2 and a half month seedling update. These little guys are taking off fast now. If destiny is a real thing, I’d say I was destined to find these trees before they go completely extinct. I had a hunch to check out an area where they built an industrial park a few years ago. Huge swaths of undeveloped forest were cleared for commerce, with many lots still vacant. Prime habitat for chestnut sprouts once stuck in the understory to grow rapidly in abundant sunshine. I found dozens of flowering trees today, with last year’s empty burs on the ground. These male catkins aren’t fully developed yet, which happens at the end of June. I’m stoked to have stumbled on another expansive grove of these, and look forward to collecting fertile burs in the fall so that the genetics can be preserved into the future. This is what I was put on this earth to do. My small part in helping to bring a species back from the brink of extinction
That’s Awesome. May want to keep a close eye on those vacant lots tho. You see more heavy equipment RUN!!
I keep a 2 foot high cage on that raised bed. 1/2 square hardware cloth has worked so far. I read sometimes critters will tunnel in there from underneath though…
They like chestnuts more than acorns or walnuts. I had Chinese chestnuts in one of my outdoor pots over the winter that didn’t make it. They rotted inside the shell when the spring thaw came. Didn’t matter to the squirrels and chipmunks. Within an hour of me uncovering them, they scarfed up every single moldy chestnut (about 50 in total) It’s like amphetamines to them.
It’s amazing how many times I can drive by something and not notice it. In my defense, these trees were draped in grape vines and bittersweet. On a backroad close to my work, there’s a huge black walnut plantation that’s been neglected for years. Interspersed with the walnuts are a bunch of cultivated chestnuts. It’s that time of year where the chestnuts are in full bloom, so I caught these in my peripheral vision this morning. They’re not American, but not full Asian chestnut either. I’m guessing these are Dunstan hybrids based on the leaf characteristics. This is the first time I really got a close up picture of the male catkins, and also saw the female flowers that will become the actual chestnut burs (first picture, centered and in the bottom third of the photo)
Looks like it’s my lucky day. Here’s a flowering American chestnut that fought its way to the top of the canopy. I’d love to get up close to it and document it in the TreeSnap app I use, but it’s on private property. Looks like I’ll have to admire it from the road only. This is a tiny glimpse of what the Appalachian forests looked like this time of year a century ago. There were so many chestnuts back then that the canopy looked like it was covered in snow. It was said (a little hyperbolic) that a squirrel could travel from southern Maine to northern Georgia and never leave the chestnut canopy.
