ArtsEtc.

Fighting for our chestnuts

"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire/ Jack Frost nipping at your nose."

As a child, when I heard these warm words emanating from my parents' stereo on Christmas Eve, I found myself wondering if anybody actually ate chestnuts as a part of their holiday celebration. It was puzzling to me that an American Christmas carol would mention a food that seemed so foreign.

What I did not know in my naive boyhood days was the American celebration of Christmas had not always been as chestnut-poor as it appeared to me. In fact, the Eastern United States used to be littered with chestnut trees. Families in Appalachia used to delight in these trees, enjoying their nuts both fresh and roasted and using their wood to shingle roofs, side houses and build furniture. These Americans prized their chestnut trees, which were larger and produced sweeter, more tender nuts than Chinese chestnut trees. So useful were the trees they served as a sort of low-maintenance cash crop for many Appalachians.

However, if you look beyond the roomy chestnut-wood armoires and tasty wintertime chestnuts of old, there is a dark side to the history of the tree. In 1904 a number of Chinese chestnut trees were imported into the United States to stand alongside their American counterparts in the Bronx Zoo in New York.

Unfortunately, in addition to botanical variety and natural beauty, these trees brought with them an awful blight. Though Chinese trees were naturally resistant to chestnut blight, American trees were very susceptible to the disease. The blight spread like wildfire, and the American chestnut nearly went extinct by the 1950s. Today, it is impossible to buy an American chestnut in a grocery store, much less to frolic in the idyllic chestnut groves that existed in Appalachia just a century ago. A few trees, some old furniture and a couple of written accounts of happy, chestnut-filled days of 19th century childhoods are all that remain of the American chestnut tree.

The small number of specimens left in the country live a dire existence. They are mostly unable to propagate themselves, and when their seeds fall to the ground, almost all of the seedlings are stricken with blight and die before they become viable chestnut trees.

Two groups are attempting to reverse this sad state of affairs and bring the American chestnut tree back to the national landscape. One of these, The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), is attempting to use Chinese chestnuts, the very species that led to the American chestnut's demise, to revive the old species. The group employs a technique called "back breeding," creating a hybrid tree that is part-American, part-Chinese. The organization hopes to develop blight-resistant trees that are fifteen-sixteenths American and one-sixteenth Chinese. While the tree would have a mixed heritage, project researchers predict the nuts produced by the trees would have the same taste and texture as those that once covered the forest floor of the Eastern U.S. TACF expects to produce blight-resistant American chestnut trees within the next five years.

The other group of scientists and farmers attempting to bring the old trees back is the American Chestnut Cooperators' Foundation (ACCF). This group aims to produce a viable, blight-resistant, 100 percent American chestnut tree through selective breeding. About one in 10 American chestnut seedlings has blight resistance, and the ACCF hopes by breeding these blight-resistant trees with one another, they can produce a large, self-perpetuating population of the trees. Unlike TACF, the ACCF is vague about their timeline in producing a large number of blight-resistant American chestnut trees, but its members are optimistic about the prospects of their project.

Regardless of which one of these groups first brings the American chestnut tree back to life, we will all benefit from the return of their sweet, tender nuts. Now there is a chance my children will not grow up with the same confusion over Christmas carols as I felt, provided global warming does not keep Jack Frost from nipping at their little noses.

 

Jason Engelhart is a senior majoring in economics and history. If you know of a rare chestnut tree specimen in Wisconsin, contact TACF or the ACCF. If, for some reason, you want to e-mail Jason, his address is jengelhart@badgerherald.com.