The American Chestnut
American Chestnut trees.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. Do you ever wonder where that Christmas carol came from? The famous song The Christmas Carol was written by Mel Torme and Robert Wells. In part commemorating roasting chestnuts. And other Christmas things.
For nearly a century roasting chestnuts was synonymous with the smell of Christmas in America. The American Chestnut grew just about everywhere along the eastern seaboard from Maine to Alabama and as far west as Kentucky. Train loads of chestnuts used to be shipped to major cities where the nuts were roasted by street vendors during the Christmas Holiday season. Roasted it had a slightly nutty flavor, but raw it is supposed to taste similar to a carrot. I have not had the pleasure of roasted chestnuts yet, but someday I will find myself some for roasting.
The wood itself was prized for its rot resistance and the fact the tree grew large and fast made it ideal for use in log cabins and any type of woodcraft in the 18th and 19th centuries. Often if not used for lumber or woodworking, the tree is made for stunning visual display in yards or in urban settings.
This all changed in the late 19th century when a botanist at the New York Botanical Gardens noticed one of the specimen trees was showing signs of blight infection. The American Chestnut had no resistance to chestnut blight that was brought here by some imported specimens of Chinese chestnut. Within 40 years pretty much nearly every American Chestnut was dead from the blight. It spread rapidly.
There are groups now trying to create a blight-resistant version of the American Chestnut. One is American Chestnut Foundation. You can check out their website for more details on what they do. On their site, they point out that the American Chestnut is well suited for rocky acidic soils. Growing the trees in these areas will restore the ecosystem and improve the landscape.
But how do we bring the trees back? Aren’t they all gone? There are a few websites that do indeed offer American Chestnut seedlings for sale. Some of the trees have shown some blight resistance or they were never exposed — which is hard to believe. A search on the internet should bring you across a few nursery’s that offer chestnuts for your own roasting and seedlings for your own propagation, but plant two for pollination purposes.
Keeping American Chestnuts in the wild is not essential but would be a boon for our forests and timber industry. How do we create a blight-resistant version though? Cross-breeding with the Chinese chestnut or other blight-resistant versions or a GMO version using an oxalate oxidase gene from wheat that aids the tree in resisting the chestnut blight. The GMO version is almost ready, at the time of writing this, for release. If approved they would be the first genetically modified forest tree in North America.
So maybe try and find some chestnuts to roast for yourself or find a nursery that has seedlings for sale and frow one or two American Chestnuts trees in your back yard.
My family has a large and old chestnut tree in our front yard on Whidbey Island. That is a horse chestnut that is not edible by humans but can be used for making soap if you wish.
I wrote about that tree here as part of Weeds & Wildflowers.
Thank you
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