Its one of the best Christmas songs you have to admit.. some of em feel like a brain tumor (yup.. Jingle Bells, sung by Simon and The Chipmunks click this link at your peril.. it's a special level of hell made for your Aunt Thelma), but when this one, Nat King Cole, gets stuck in your head, it's not bad, it does make you feel warm.. you feel the fire, smell the smell of roasting sugars, and it feels cozy... pre-global warming cozy... nothing to worry about cozy... it's a damn good song. But what the hell was Nat King Cole talking about?
It's a rare American city where the festive cheer leads to roasted chestnuts, but you can find em sometimes, at Christmas markets and state fairs. My first time seeing them of all places was in Europe where the crop is more steady. It was a lonely Christmas in Munich, and I wandered their famous Christmas Market, complete with Glockenspiel ( A favorite joke German word of a college buddy of mine, and how relieved I was to find out it was just a clock..) and some guy was roasting these little round things over coal and it turns out they were little salty morsels of goodness, Chestnuts in English.
As a kid I was luck enough to have a mentor who was a Vocational Agriculture teacher and knew his forestry, and he once told me about the great American Chestnut, which wasn't a distant memory when he was born in 1938. If you read accounts of the first settlers Poking into the American Wilderness and past the Alleghenies, men like Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett, they spoke of game so prolific you didn't have to be a great woodsman to kill them, you could almost swing a stick. The forests of the east were thick with game, in part because of the die off of Native Americans due to introduced diseases, which led to a lull in hunting pressure for years or decades in advance of European Western Expansion from the Atlantic Coast, but greatly due to this one tree, the American Chestnut. Their nuts were so nutritious and ample that they coated hundreds of thousands of square miles of forests with deeply nutritious food. Naturalists estimate that had no other impacts happened, no European encroachment, hunting pressures, predator extinctions or invasives, earth worms from ship holds or land clearing, that the loss of the American Chestnut still would've cut game numbers by huge percentages due to loss of such a rich forage. What Krill is to the Ocean, the basis of the food web, The American Chestnut was to the Eastern Forest of the US.
It was 1 in every 4 trees across the Eastern Forests of North America, but a blight took it, reduced it from billions (yes, with a B, they estimate 4 Billion) of trees to nothing in just years, from 1904 when some nursery stock was brought over to the New York area from Japan with a peculiar blight (hmmm.. if they know this much, do they know the actual shipment?) A Biologist discovered it as it killed a stand of Chestnuts at the NEw York Botanical Gardens, but the cat was out of the bag, and it spread for the next 40 years until there were essentially no mature trees left by WWII.
The same thing happened to it's smaller cousin, the American Cincquapin, which struggled to hang onto life in places like Arkansas but did fare slightly better. You might find places where shoots kept trying to grow from old seeds of the American Chestnut, or you might find a Chinese Chestnut and confuse it for an American one ( I did once in 1994 on my last days on a very long trail as it ran through New York State where I patched up a missed section in time for, yup, Christmas. Spikey looking nuts, but my mentor figured it was Chinese sadly), but they would die by 30 years old, 30 rings, almost without fail.
Well, as luck would have it, almost without fail. The way nature works (since I just got an earful on Darwin in the South Atlantic, on some lil' islands famous for a brush with the big state in 1982.) is that if you attack 4 Billion individuals with something, inevitably, one of em is gonna adapt and survive, and it turns out, far and wide, woodsmen and naturalists started to notice.
Wikipedia, always ahead of me, but not quite a place of Christmas cheer, has a list, updated to 2015, of all the known surviving individuals..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut
it's these individuals that led to two distinct and interesting attempts to bring the Chestnut back, to literally restore the basis of Eastern Ecology prior to the 20th century, so altered by the busy hands of Americans (Idle Hands do the Devils work we were all told, and man were we busy.. my most popular posts, no matter where I write about in the world, are all about efforts to restore ecological balance east of the Rockies, which ain't easy, because us industrious Bi-Pedal Beaver Monkeys known as Americans sure screwed it up!).
Now I am not a Botanist.. I hardly know what a cell is. I slept through that part daydreaming (and occasionally full on dreaming, a bad class sleeper was I) of History, Politics and the woods, my three childhood loves, but the way it has been explained to me is that there are two separate efforts to restore the chestnut, and in true American spirit, both are welcomed. One is based on hybridizing with Chinese Chestnuts, the other on breeding resistant American Specimens only if I understand. The names are quite similar:
Located in the very western point of Virginia on a 150 acre experimental farm loaded with chestnut experiments, near the Cumberland Gap and Bristol Tennessee, near Clinch Mountain where the Stanley Brothers learned to sing, The American Chestnut Foundation is using the Chinese Chestnut genes, about 2%, 98% Native Bred, to make the process happen fast.
I'll let them explain their process for those who want to know, something they call Backcrossing to enhance genetic diversity past the two somewhat resistant trees they started with, and wove Chinese Blight Resistance into.
http://www.acf.org/r_r.php
The other guys are the All American Act, started in 1986 in Western Virginia and West Virginia, in and around Virginia Tech, known as the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation. They are trying to slowly but surely hybridized a great breeding chestnut crop that can handle the hot humid conditions that foster the blight with home grown resistance. It's a long road, if not longer for them. They also are already placing specimens back into forest both in promising places and in locations where they have discovered other survivors of the great blight in the hills above Blacksburg, above the great Shenandoah.
Both Organizations will admit to you that this is a looooooong process. They both seem to have started in the 80's, and with just a few individuals, both human and chestnut, and just bringing a chestnut to breeding age, with no screw ups, while fast for a tree, is a 6-10 year proposition. It's going to be a long time before we are sprinkling seeds from George Jetson Space Scooters
Merry Christmas, and may there be a Chestnut in your future, to feed the growing Elk populations of the American East, and our wild souls.
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