Chestnuts

The American Chestnut (Castanea dentata), all but extinct, clings to life in the form of numerous stump-sprouts sent forth from the bases of once-giant trees, those original victims of the chestnut blight. Stump-sprouts are clones of the original tree, and thus every sprouted tree is genetically destined to succumb to this disease as well. Soon after their young smooth bark begins to split and mature, the fatal and omnipresent fungus enters the phloem and the canker begins. What hope is there for this majestic tree, this fallen king of the canopy? Must we and the mast-loving denizens of upland forests accept its crook-backed usurping brother, the red oak, in its place? There are two courses - one rational, the other Romantic. The rational route is to hybridize our chestnut with the commonly-consumed and blight-resistant Chinese chestnut (C. mollissima), of which many promising hybrids have now been bred to 99% purity. They will be immune, but can we fool ourselves into believing that a hybrid may ever come to dominate the central hardwood forest? It is an unsavory thought, such human meddling reaching so far into and across our woods. Rather I hope for a more natural way, a sylvan dream. That dream is for seed, sexual reproduction, cross-pollination between wild flowering trees which at least gives the chance for a genetic variation to flip the switch of immunity. But they do not flower, nor seed, do they? Well, atop Mt. Lincoln in UMass' very own Cadwell Forest, a former grad student logged and/or burned some research plots that were riddled with diminutive chestnut sprouts. In far less than a decade they resprouted with great vigor, suggestive of their former status, and now tower some 30 ft. over the huckleberry shrubs. Sure enough, as many of these tall trees rub shoulders with each other, they have flowered and shared pollen and put forth wild triumphant seed! Now the temptation - do I harvest and eat them? can I resist the urge to taste this wild fruit before it is truly gone? My advisor says I may as well since they have next to no chance of survival and even less chance of growing into mature fruiting trees. He says the only hope is in hybrids. I tell him, while looking optimistically into the fruited canopy, that I would rather hope for an improbability than actively create an impossibility.