In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
Rare Chestnut Trees Discovered
allen griggs
Member Posts: 35,690 ✭✭✭✭
Albany Ga. AP
A stand of American chestnut trees that somehow escaped a blight that killed off nearly all their kind in the early 1900s has been discovered along a hiking trail not far from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Little White House at Warm Springs.
The find has stirred excitement among those working to restore the American Chestnut.
--sorry, this is the entire article from the Asheville paper today. I googled it but nothing has come up on the internet yet. -AG
A stand of American chestnut trees that somehow escaped a blight that killed off nearly all their kind in the early 1900s has been discovered along a hiking trail not far from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Little White House at Warm Springs.
The find has stirred excitement among those working to restore the American Chestnut.
--sorry, this is the entire article from the Asheville paper today. I googled it but nothing has come up on the internet yet. -AG
Comments
Reminds me of the Ginko tree. During the time of the dinosaurs, seed plants were the most dominant vegetation on earth, especially the lush seed ferns, conifers and palmlike cycads. These primitive seed plants are called gymnosperms (meaning "naked seeds") because their seeds are not enclosed in a ripened fruit but are protected by cones or by a fleshy seed coat.
Anyway, they were thought to be extinct until the 19th century - found only in fossil records.
Ginkos were 'discovered' living in remote Chinese valleys - brought to America (and Europe) propagated and now can be seen all over Manhattan ... in in my backyard! Pretty neat plant story.[:D]
PJ
from abcnews.go.com
Rare Chestnut Trees Found
By ELLIOTT MINOR
ALBANY, Ga. May 18, 2006 (AP)- A stand of American chestnut trees that somehow escaped a blight that killed off nearly all their kind in the early 1900s has been discovered along a hiking trail not far from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Little White House at Warm Springs.
The find has stirred excitement among those working to restore the American chestnut, and raised hopes that scientists might be able to use the pollen to breed hardier chestnut trees.
"There's something about this place that has allowed them to endure the blight," said Nathan Klaus, a biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources who spotted the trees. "It's either that these trees are able to resist the blight, which is unlikely, or Pine Mountain has something unique that is giving these trees resistance."
Experts say it could be that the chestnuts have less competition from other trees along the dry, rocky ridge. The fungus that causes the blight thrives in a moist environment.
The largest of the half-dozen or so trees is about 40 feet tall and 20 to 30 years old, and is believed to be the southernmost American chestnut discovered so far that is capable of flowering and producing nuts.
"This is a terrific find," said David Keehn, president of the Georgia chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation. "A tree of this size is one in a million."
The rugged area known as Pine Mountain is at the southern end of the Appalachians near Warm Springs, where Roosevelt built a home and sought treatment after he was stricken with polio in 1921.
"FDR may have roasted some chestnuts on his fire for Christmas or enjoyed their blooms in the spring," Klaus said.
The chestnut foundation may use pollen from the tree in a breeding program aimed at restoring the population with blight-resistant trees.
"When the flowers are right, we're going to rush down and pollinate the flowers, collect the seeds a few weeks later and collect the nuts," Klaus said. "If we ever find a genetic solution to the chestnut blight, genes from that tree will find their way into those trees."
The chestnut foundation has been working for about 15 years to develop a blight-resistant variety. The goal is to infuse the American chestnut with the blight-resistant genes of the Chinese chestnut.
American chestnuts once made up about 25 percent of the forests in the eastern United States, with an estimated 4 billion trees from Maine to Mississippi and Florida.
The trees helped satisfy demand for roasted chestnuts, and their rot-resistant wood was used to make fence posts, utility poles, barns, homes, furniture and musical instruments.
Then these magnificent hardwoods, which could grow to a height of 100 feet and a diameter of 8 feet or more, were almost entirely wiped out by a fast-spreading fungus discovered in 1904.
"There are no chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and if they are, they're Chinese," Keehn said.
Please stay on topic. That tree is clearly a pine or fir.
This thread is about chestnuts.
Great picture, though.
Brad Steele
http://www.acf.org/default.htm
He got me growing the trees about 10 years ago and I have 15 trees growing on my property. We have found many American Chestnut trees that were apparently planted by people who settled this area, as they are not a native species here. Some cemeteries in the area also have these trees. Besides roasting them, the nuts make into a flour that makes awesome cookies!
The deer and elk are really hard on the saplings so we have to protect them with fencing until they grow above the browse height. Another problem we have is the shot-hole borer. (They are a beetle that will attack the juvenile trees.)
You have to be quick to harvest the nuts because if the Orientals get wind where they are, they're gone!
If most of the species were killed off in the early 1900's, and this stand survuved, why are the most mature trees in this stand, "about 40 feet tall and 20 to 30 years old"--as the article stated???
In Germany or Austria there must be a chestnut tree growing on the property in order to have an official "beer garden".
It's early, I'm on my first cup of coffee, so it's 'prolly just me, but something doesn't add up?!?!
If most of the species were killed off in the early 1900's, and this stand survuved, why are the most mature trees in this stand, "about 40 feet tall and 20 to 30 years old"--as the article stated???
You have asked a good question. Where did these trees come from?
The article says this area is "the southern end of the Appalachians".
Well, I am from Georgia and I have been to Pine Mountain, and it is nowhere near any mountains. It ought to be called "Pine Hill", when you are there you don't see any mountain. To say it is a hundred or more miles from the Appalachians would be more accurate.
So, I doubt that the trees were native to this are.
So, thirty years ago, where the hell did someone get some American chestnuts to plant near Pine Mountain?
quote:Originally posted by wanted man
It's early, I'm on my first cup of coffee, so it's 'prolly just me, but something doesn't add up?!?!
If most of the species were killed off in the early 1900's, and this stand survuved, why are the most mature trees in this stand, "about 40 feet tall and 20 to 30 years old"--as the article stated???
You have asked a good question. Where did these trees come from?
The article says this area is "the southern end of the Appalachians".
Well, I am from Georgia and I have been to Pine Mountain, and it is nowhere near any mountains. It ought to be called "Pine Hill", when you are there you don't see any mountain. To say it is a hundred or more miles from the Appalachians would be more accurate.
So, I doubt that the trees were native to this are.
So, thirty years ago, where the hell did someone get some American chestnuts to plant near Pine Mountain?
They describe a stand of trees. The trees ancestors have no doubt been in the area for many hundreds of years. Chestnuts are native to the entire eastern seaboard, they are just scarce because of the fungus a hundred years ago.Just because no one recorded the stand of trees does not mean they were not there for a long time. Chestnut trees have nuts which fall on the ground and grow into new trees. So about thirty years ago, a chestnut tree in the same area dropped its nuts and a new tree started to grow.
I live in the NC mountains and had thought the chestnuts only lived in the mountains.
But I found a web site that says they thrived from Maine to Florida.
It looks like bad news for these Pine Mtn. trees. Here is part of this other article:
American chestnuts once made up about 25 percent of the forests in the eastern United States, with an estimated 4 billion trees from Maine to Mississippi and Florida. Their rot-resistant wood was used to make fence posts, utility poles, barns, homes, furniture and musical instruments and their nuts supplied food for wildlife and provided cash for poor mountain families in Appalachia who sold them to satisfy a demand for roasted chestnuts.
Then these magnificent hardwoods, which could grow to a height of 100 feet and a diameter of 8 feet or more, were almost entirely wiped out by a fast-spreading fungus discovered in 1904. Introduced on imported Asian chestnut trees, the fungus is considered by some experts to have triggered one of the Western Hemisphere's worst environmental disasters.
With little resistance, only a few flowering American chestnut trees were left by 1950. Spread by wind, birds and animals, the fungus girdles the stem of the tree, killing everything above.
The roots of the old trees have survived and send out shoots known as "stump sprouts" each year. They can grow to the size of bushes, but they are eventually killed off by the ever-present blight.
"There are millions of bushes," said Paul Sisco, the chestnut foundation's Southern science coordinator in Ashville, N.C. "To find a standing tree is fairly rare."
It's rarer still to find one as far south as Pine Mountain, he said.
Because the blight is still around, Sisco believes even the Pine Mountain trees will eventually be killed by the disease, making the preservation of their unique genetic traits even more important.
"They are blighted," he said. "We rarely find trees that are blight free."