ghosts in the woods

Have you ever had chestnuts roasted on an open fire?

Me neither.

Have you ever wondered why not?

Me neither, until I started to become a tree geek a few years ago. If you ever find yourself putting one foot in the door of arboriculture, it won't be long till you here about the American Chestnut, and how it is no longer.

Last December, I proudly shared this fact with my mother, an avid and skilled gardener:

"Mom, did you know the American Chestnut is virtually extinct?" I said, proud to show off my arboricultural acumen.

"Well," her tone was famously polite, "yes, except that there are half a dozen of them growing down the street."

I accused her of lying, or even worse, a mistaken botanical identification. Polite, yet not easily swayed, my mother suggested we go for a walk, and so we did. Sure enough, we found half a dozen chestnuts with one and two foot diameter trunks growing along Riverside Drive, right there on the edge of Atlanta.

I wasn't wholly wrong, however, because it is true the American Chestnut, Castanea Dentata, has virtually disappeared from our forests. A century ago, a blight on the chestnuts began its steady progress through the northeast, then spread south down throughout the east until almost every chestnut, sapling to towering giant, was nothing but a skeleton of trunks and limbs. 

My grandfather, who grew up in Sweetwater in eastern Tennessee, remembers the year that the blight swept through our part of the world. He said one year the forests and hillsides were covered with massive chestnuts. The next year, only dead trunks and stumps.

If you're in the same generation as me, you've never thought of chestnuts when you think of the woods. Pines, oaks, maples - all of these are familiar to us, and we would notice if they were gone, tree geek or not. But we don't realize that our forests look very different from the way they did just over a half a century ago. They're still changing, and the forests of the southeastern mountains are going to look completely different to us within a decade if and probably when the eastern hemlock goes extinct in the wild, but that's a different story.

Some good folks in the worlds of botany, horticulture, and arboriculture, have devoted their life work to hybridizing American Chestnuts that will resist the blight that wiped, and would continue to wipe them out. The American Chestnut Foundation is at work in forests all over the place reintroducing and protecting fragile populations of chestnut trees.

Right here in Chattanooga, ringed by mountains, we live amongst forests that used to be dominated by Chestnuts. That is one reason why the ACF has chosen a swath of land on the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain to plant hundreds of chestnuts in an effort to reintroduce them in the wild. The Lula Lake Land Trust, a well kept secret in eastern Tennessee that is only open to the public once a month, is the site of this work. We spent half the day last Saturday hiking around the land trust and got to trek over to the pocket where these tiny saplings are growing underneath massive old oaks and on the edges of hemlock groves.

And what did Nora think of all this talk of arboriculture, extinction, and hybridization?

She was thrilled.