A 100-year Project

Deep in the mountains, on a 73-acre farm, one Highlands local has teamed up with the American Chestnut Foundation to make sure the American chestnut does not go extinct.

On Sept. 3, 2015, Sallie Smith was the recipient of several newly grown chestnut hybrids, part of a 100-year project from the American Chestnut Foundation. On Friday, Lisa Thomson visited Smith to check up on the hybrids.

Thomson said a lot has happened since 2015.

“Seven years in a 100-year project is not incremental, but the most important thing is that we are speeding up the science,” Thomson said. “We partner with a lot of private landowners. They seem to be very invested in our experiment and they seem to not mind the mortality or successes in the trees that they plant, and they want to be apart of it. About 80 percent of the United States’ land is owned by private landowners. So, we partner with the United States Forest Service, and they are really important to us, but we really want those private owners to get the chestnut bug.”

Though they may not live to see a full chestnut forest, Thomson and Smith both agree they are part of a movement to bring back an important species.

“This species was so important to the Appalachian people,” Thomson said. “They used this plant very exclusively. They called it the cradle-to-grave tree because they would use it for wood, they would use the nuts to feed their livestock and they would gather them themselves and go down to the local country store and sell them or trade them for shoes. They would even get on trains and go up to New York City where they would sell them on the sidewalk.”

Smith is part of a seed sponsorship program through the American Chestnut Foundation.   

“It is $300 for four seeds,” Thomson said. “People re-up every year, and I know that it sounds expensive, but it does fund our research and development. They honestly get hooked, like Sallie did. Soon the trees start sprouting and they send us report cards on how the trees are doing. It’s really an optimistic and hopeful mission. In the environmental movement, there is so much gloom and doom and this is really a bright spot in the movement.”

The foundation has 500 volunteer-run American Chestnut Tree orchards all the way from Maine to Alabama.

“They are all completely volunteer-run orchards,” Thomson said. “We have four regional managers that help them. We have a lot of people that are involved in this project.”

The prime area for the chestnut to thrive, according to Thomson, is right here in the Appalachian Mountains.

“This is basically where they were,” Thomson said. “They were in the Piedmont in the 1700s, but another disease, root rot, took them out. They are mostly in the Appalachians, up in Ontario and all the way down to Mississippi. It’s said that a squirrel could go from treetop to tree top all the way from Maine to Alabama without touching the ground.”

So, why has the American Chestnut Tree almost gone extinct? Thomson said in 1904, a blight was brought from a Chinese Chestnut variant that wiped out the American species.

“The blight hitchhiked on some Chinese material when people were doing a lot of horticultural gardening,” Thomson said. “The microbes of that chestnut migrated along with the material and our poor chestnut hadn’t evolved to handle the blight. All the way to the 1950s, trees started dying 25 miles a year. By 1960, scientists and researchers basically gave up trying to save it.”

The Chestnut Foundation was founded in 1983, with the mission to create a hybrid to withstand the blight.

“It was founded on a dream and a hope that we could bring these trees back,” Thomson said. “Basically, we are breeding the American species with the Chinese species and then, eventually, eliminating the Chinese characteristics. It is a long and slow process, and I mentioned speeding up the science. So, what we are doing now, is growing them into little seedlings, like the ones I gave to Sallie. Since 1983, we have created a pretty good blight resistant tree, but not quite as resistant as we have hoped.”

Thomson said the process began with 60,000 trees and traditional breeding.

“We have tried all kinds of methods,” Thomson said. “And we are learning every single year. We began with injecting the blight into the trees up at our research farm, which has 60,000 trees in different stages of hybridization. We slowly test them with the blight. So, basically, get them sick on purpose to see how they react to the blight. The trees develop cankers, where we inject the blight, and if the cankers heal over and respond well, then we will keep them. If they do not respond well, we cut them down and burn them. It is very labor intensive. We do cross pollination so that the best kids are kept with the best family and those are the seeds that we give to our seed sponsors.”

Smith’s wish is that the trees will come back fully.

“We have already lost hemlocks,” Smith said. “To be able to help bring the chestnuts back, I think would be a great thing.”

The farm’s caretaker, Dan Martino, helps Smith make sure the chestnut seedlings grow into full trees.

“We basically have to check on them every single day and talk to them,” Martino said. “They are like little ole babies. The biggest thing is making sure that they are in an environment where they can thrive. The way that we base the entirety of the landscape of this property is to promote the growth of this tree.”

- by Christopher Lugo