Imagine a chestnut forest . . .
From a common North American tree to an endangered species: the story of the American chestnut.
Imagine a tree species whose range covered roughly 300,000 square miles from southern Ontario to Alabama, from Maine to Georgia, from Wisconsin to Arkansas. Now imagine that this tree species produced superb, straight-grained wood that was extremely resistant to decay. This tree was used to build houses, make split-rail fences, furniture, shingles, paper and telephone poles. A tree whose nuts were edible (roasted on an open fire) and were used to fatten hogs. Cattle were sent out into the forests to forage. This was the American chestnut, once one of North America’s most common trees. By 1900 a blight that came to America with imported nursery stock wiped out chestnut forests. Today, individual trees are just barely hanging on.
Passenger pigeons, once present in ‘infinite numbers’ in North America, are now also extinct. Cotton Mather once described a flock “as being about a mile in width and taking several hours to pass overhead.” A major food and nesting habitat of these masses of birds? American chestnut trees.
The surprise grove
Human beings are making heroic efforts to save the few remaining adult trees and the sprouts (‘suckers’) from chestnut trees whose trunks have long since succumbed. These efforts include planting nuts, hybridization, selective breeding and possible genetic engineering to enable trees to resist the various chestnut blights. Ontario has a recovery program for the American chestnut trees in isolated or in small stands from Hamilton to London to Windsor and south, anywhere the Carolinian forest remains. There you may find a few American chestnut stumps with live suckers growing from the base.
There’s one exception . . . one grove of awe-inspiring giant American chestnut trees growing – of all places – in South Surrey, British Columbia. They were planted by people who created their own arboretum long, long ago. No blight in B.C.
Small sanctuaries
Neither you nor I will ever live to see a huge forest of American chestnuts. It isn’t the first case of native species being decimated by introduced pests or disease. Think about the magnificent “cathedrals” formed by American elms in cities like Winnipeg. Gone to Dutch elm disease. Almost gone, ash trees to the ‘imported’ emerald ash borer.
On our farm in Quick, B.C., we have a green ash tree which we got as a seedling. No ash borers here. And we have a couple elms from an area where you will find no Dutch elm disease. We think of our farm as a sanctuary for these native species that are in desperate straits. We can now sit – if not under a vine or fig tree – beneath an elm tree, with a pea vine nearby in the summer.
