Dunstan chestnut trees for sale walmart 2023

Saw this really amazing video[0] the other day about American Chestnut Foundation's breeding program in Virginia to revive the American chestnut

Basically they hybridized it with Chinese/Japanese chestnuts (which are blight resistant). Then they take the offspring, test for blight resistance and rebreed those back with purebred American chestnuts. Then they repeat the process. Take those offspring, select for blight resistance, rebreed with American species, etc

After a few generations they created an American chestnut tree that looks almost exactly like the purebred versions but retains the blight resistance of the Japanese and Chinese species

Really amazing work

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbrY-J0bpto

Simple, yet effective. I've heard it said modern fruits are relatively tasteless compared to their older counterparts because they are bred for size and hardiness. I wonder if these can be backcrossed as well to produce more flavorful fruits with similar sizes

I imagine soil quality and time of harvest also play a decent part in taste. All other factors being equal picking a green tomato isn’t going to be as good as letting it ripen on the vine naturally.

Terroir is the term for this. It's variation in flavour isn't as great as varietal/strain based differences. But yes it does have some impact most commonly taken advantage of in wine production.

Interesting. I love nuts of all types, but not the chestnut. It's really more like a small potato than a nut. I wonder if the old ones tasted better.

Fresh they taste almost like sweet corn, I got to try a few American chestnuts last year, they are sweeter (but smaller) than the chinese chestnuts. My landlord boils the chinese one and eats them like mashed potatos, I roast them in oven or air fry them. To me they are like bread from the trees.

The English ones are starchy I guess? These are common to see in grocery stores when in season.

Also handling changes how sweet they get, some say they must be chilled in fridge for some days to get starches to convert to sugar. For me the Americans are perfect no matter the treatment. Chinese chestnuts I'm fighting getting to them fast enough before any mold grows, processing them immediately to kill chestnut weevil (I use a sous vide and let them sit at whatever temp the rutgers publication suggested to kill potential eggs) then I dry and fridge them for a few days before putting them in oven/airfryer. It sounds like a pain in the ass but it's a lot easier and less foul than the year I gathered and processed gingko seeds (which smells like dogshit) or even black walnuts which will stain your hands for over a week if you don't know to wear gloves.

Another protip: Don't plant a chestnut tree near a swimming pool. Those spines are sharp enough to pop a bicycle tire and the catkins smell like a callery pear when it's dumping pollen which is pretty gross.

Dude I have just the recipe for you. Come on down to Chile and ask for puré de castañas. The really oppressed Chilean women make it the best, it's highly unique, I actually thought I could eat a chestnut because I used to eat this dish, kept biting into absolute bitterness. But bitter isn't bad, now that I'm addicted to something bitter (an undisclosed stimulant) I prefer bitterness to sweetness, but not everyone can be an addict, the addiction doesn't always take. Too bitter. Just like the American Chestnut didn't always take. Too bitter.

Love the bitterness. And in the dish there's a trace bitterness natural to the chestnut left in the puré, which involves sweetening chestnuts and also some I think crema Chantillí or leche condensada not sure which.

.

Let me add that in my unique Chileanized upbringing, as an American, a Chilean woman, in this unique case not oppressed, explained to me why I couldn't eat a cactus fruit, what's it called, tuna (no relation to fish in absolutely any way). So typically, she explained, gringos bite it wrong. They think you gotta bite it till your jaw closes, your teeth meet up again after that long goodbye when you put the fruit in your mouth. No, you gotta close your teeth less, not chew, no no, and she explained it to me in plain Spanish in a way I, a Chileanized American, a gringo, a gringuito (and in fact there was a movie about a Chileanized American called El Gringuito in the late 90's in Chile, huge hit), how to eat the native fruit. But I was a kid. This partial chewing made it good to eat, I can vouch. They would never tell you to only chew partially of politeness. But I can. I'm passing that on, to eat tuna fruit, work on your bite, don't bite all the way, like almost. Because it has a lot of seeds, very hard seeds, you see, so biting it all the way hurts, so you hate it.

Like bitterness. Great flavor, in fact.

I know it sucks. But I'm taking the first step and saying they're oppressed, which they are.

I don't know why things in Chile work the way they do. I wasn't born here. I'm a guest, basically. An immigrant, got naturalized.

For an example, the red delicious apple. 75% of the Washington state's apples in the 1980s. It was bred for color and shelf life and, in the process, they bred out the taste. In 2000, a congressional bailout was approved for the growers that had lost $760 million dollars over a 3 year period due to the now-worthless apples.

Hawkeye is what Red Delicious used to be. You can still find it grown by smaller orchards around the country.

The hard thing with taste is that it's usually the sum of many quantitative traits, each one being governed by several genes which can be located on different chromosomes, as seen in tomato[1]. Transferring enough of them into the modern genome through backcross would probably require a crazy amount of generations... or a crazy amount of luck :)

[1] https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/erf058

You would need to map the relevant loci and then use a speed congenic selection strategy. Done in mice easily. Mapping the loci modulating traits like disease resistance or taste is the hard part.

CRISPR as currently used is not functionally capable of cutting and pasting large swaths of the genome, it is for small specific edits

Saw that video recently as well. What's remarkable about this find is the size of the specimen, and that it's confirmed to be 100% American Chestnut. Hopefully with the hybrid approach, this find, and further breeding/propagation work, we can see a large scale return of this incredible species.

Why don't they use agrobacterium transfection, gene guns, or molecular techniques to directly transfer the resistance genes over? Do we not know what the genes themselves are?

I'm not criticizing their technique! Nor do I think I know better. This is amazing and valuable work, and I'd love to know more.

There is actually a parallel technique nearing the finish line that does sort of this. The gene they moved though is from wheat not another tree species, but still seems to give great blight resistance. Currently the barrier to it is entirely regularity. I believe it would be one of the first plants approved to just be released into the wild without something to prevent it reproducing naturally. The normal anti genetic engineering types are very opposed, but it seems likely it will get approved in the next few years.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/magazine/american-chestnu...

What authority can enforce approval or disapproval to release something into the wild? Suppose I own land next to a national park. Then can’t I plant whatever I want on that land, trusting that it will spread into the park?

These are not GMO plants—just selectively bred plants. This is similar to almost all domestic animals and most plants.

There are two parallel efforts going on at present for restoring the American chestnut, a backcross effort and a GMO-based approach. This sub-thread is concerned with the GMO strategy.

A buddy of mine has been involved in this project for years at SUNY ESF, and it's very exciting how successful it has been. There are dozens of test sites around central New York that have healthy (albeit very young) populations of American Chestnuts.

I've been wondering the same things for the past decade. It seems like it's very hard to get your gene into the right place so that it will be expressed at the right time, with enough consistency to make a stable cell line.

Also, it seems rare to find just one gene that encodes a property or compound. Usually you need several genes to form a pathway from a common precursor chemical to your target result. That pathway will be leaky, and it may take resources away from other important chemicals that the plant's lifecycle relies on.

It sounds expensive and time consuming - plants take a long time to compile, and you can forget about reproducible builds. Plus, once you have your GMO, you'll be expected to take care not to release it into the wild, and in today's world, a decent chunk of people will oppose your product because of their personal beliefs.

Good question. I'd imagine something like blight resistance would probably not be a simple case of a few specific genes we can just switch over.

It could also just be technology. This breeding program has been around for 50 years or so and CRISPR only really took off around 2011. In addition, the original CRISPR-Ca9 caused a lot of unintended changes in DNA and it's really critical that the new trees are morphologically equivalent to the original trees in order for the birds, insects, and animals that depended on them to resume their interactions. Newer technologies like CRISPR-Nickase are much more precise but also very recently developed

It actually is pretty "simple" in this case (the tree needs to produce a single chemical, oxalate oxidase). There is a program that has done this very successfully, and it just working through the regulatory process before wider distribution can happen. They have thousands of trees in (controlled) forest plots, including three generations of offspring.

That's the genetic engineering approach, but the Chinese ones have a different, more complex, less well understood, and potentially complementary resistance mechanism.

That's very interesting. The video I linked showed that blight resistant trees had a very specific response to grow extra tissue around the infection site to stop it from spreading further so I assumed it was more of a multi-pronged defense

Yes - the Asian ones that evolved with the fungus have a more complex strategy, making a purely breeding-based program challenging. Separately, some clever genetic engineering allows the trees to break down oxalic acid, which prevents the fungus from being able to efficiently attack the plant cells.

Two separate things.

These two approaches could be combined, and probably will be naturally if both varieties are introduced to the wild.

Indeed, part of the work being done by the team working on the genetic engineering approach is breeding Darling 58 with the Chinese backcrossed version.

The things the gene gun can do turn out to be not the most useful things one could hope for from it. (It's a surprisingly brute-force device, though I guess that was all in the name if you actually took it at face value!) I don't see a ton of future for it as a generalist technology, though what things it does well it does very well.

CRISPR is... awful in different ways. (It seems to have a lot of trouble controlling how much material it transfers.) It's a laboratory curio or one-off stunt now, but I fully expect it will improve.

Honestly there's probably a benefit to just avoiding more controversial tech like GMOs. There will be that much less resistance to re-introducing them back into the wild

If I recall, someone has jammed a wheat gene into a few of them in just that manner.

It's a tricky business, because chestnut had very particular properties, as wood, that made it quite valuable, and any gene interference, well ... who knows how it will change the resultant wood?

They probably have no firm idea about the key genes involved in resistance. There could be half a dozen.

You can buy the backcrosses, as far as I know...it's the modified ones from SUNY ESF that you can't buy yet.

The chestnut project is from the Commonwealth of Virginia, not West Virginia.

The genetic modification the ACF is doing is actually very controversial among the community of people commuted to restoring fruit and nut biodiversity.

I just saw Eliza Greenman speak on this subject, never expected that to circle back to HN.

Backcrossing/“breeding” is relatively uncontroversial and not considered GMO — though it may be controversial whether the eventual derived breed is a true American Chestnut.

There is a GMO effort which adds a gene to the American Chestnut so that it produces an enzyme called oxalate oxidase; the gene comes from wheat plants. The enzyme breaks down the oxalate acid produced by the blight fungus. The first GMO tree was planted in 2006 and has held up, as have others in the test plot. IIRC, USDA permission is being sought so it can be planted freely. Assuming it wins approval, I’m really hoping I can get some seedlings in a few years to plant in my forest.

https://www.esf.edu/chestnut/genes.htm

I hate these awful GMO trees! Why can't we have certified USDA Organic trees anymore!

It's a joke, but I do have questions in general about "Certified Non-GMO" versus "Modern day bananas, corn and tomatoes look nothing like they did 400 years ago". There are some types of genetic modifications that are considered "natural" and "OK" and somehow there are others that are "artificial" and "scary", but damned if I know which are which.

To play devil's advocate to myself and possibly answer my own question: I imagine there are ecological effects of GMO (some of your corn SHOULD get killed by insects). Not to mention the fact that GMO seeds are probably mostly sold by god-awful Monsanto.

“No GMO” labeling isn’t because of any of those issues though; it’s just marketing to Green Meme people, upper class Whole Foods shoppers who are big into naturalistic fallacies.

There are two “no GMO” markets: the one you mentioned, and a much smaller market of people who object to GMO for pesticide resistance instead of GMO for disease resistance.

I don’t avoid GMO foods, but I do think our current scheme incentivizes finding the strongest poison and correcting the plant to resist it, without concern for how that poison affects the rest of the environment. I would much rather we engineer the plant to resist the disease directly, but it’s harder to double dip on profits (RoundUp and RoundUp Ready) in that scheme.

casual slander of people who can choose their food? The Organic Standard of the USDA is one of the great achievements of the modern times, along with the US Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, establishment of the EPA and the Endangered Species Act. Organic foods standard was the work of thousands of people, companies and academics over a decade+. Small farmers have a chance to compete in niche markets as a relief from crushing food commodity pricing.

personal spite is misplaced, and ignorant actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification

Maybe someone with an agricultural background would have an easier time researching this, but:

"mostly" Monsanto? Or is that just an older, famous example? Lots of companies sell seeds in mass quantities -- are you saying none of them sell GMO seeds?

That's why I said probably. I just know Monsanto is famous for their "copyright" seeds that are genetically modified and you're not allowed to keep the next generation of seeds.

They're famous for lots of bullshit they didn't actually do. It's part of the demonization process.

In this case, Monsanto never sold "terminator" seeds. They (and many others) sold hybrid seeds, which don't breed true, and so are functionally equivalent to that. Hybrid seeds have been around since the 1930s, if not earlier.

In any case, they can get the same effect by contract. You were not allowed to replant Roundup Ready soybeans, and they sued (and won against) farmers who broke the contract to do that.

They won against a farmer who deliberately sprayed a field with herbicide to concentrate traces of the herbicide resistance gene that had drifted in. This was properly ruled to be deliberate violation of the patent. Nothing wrong with this.

Except the notion of patenting genes that infect natural seeds farmers must plant for next year's crop.

If the courts cannot see the distinction between farmers and plants violating patents, then the Congress may amend the law to oblige them to see it.

Thanks, that did have the odor of the urban rumor that someone "read this somewhere on the internet" and is now repeating one more time. Although he did admit his lack of sourcing.

nah, the whole ";)" "/s" "/j" nonsense can go yeet itself off a cliff. i absolutely hate that stuff.

I sent them an email asking them for seeds a few months ago, unfortunately they stopped giving them out.

Do you know if they'll resume giving them out at some point? Maybe someone else who got access to seeds can help you out

Cool to see this here and people talking about it. I volunteered with the American Chestnut Foundation during my summers in high school. Usually spent a few weeks on the Meadowview research farm collecting catkins off trees, “processing” the catkins to bottle the pollen, bagging trees to prevent uncontrolled cross pollination, and pollinating trees by hand.

My uncle and I also usually took hikes in NC to try and find remaining trees with pollen in the wild. From what I understand, the pollen from these few remaining living trees is used to help re-introduce regional biodiversity into the backcrossed American/Chinese hybrids.

Highly recommend going and helping out on the farm if you can spare a week or two, or joining your state chapter if you’ve got one - or sending your kids!

It's too late this year but would they want me to mail catkins from a chestnut producing survivor up in NJ? I also have chestnuts collected from prior years and 2 seedlings growing from some of the prior collected ones that were planted.

The survivor has 2 branches coming out of trunk each roughly 42" in circumference, it is not as tall as the one in the article but it's probably got similar girth. The tree is at least 70 years old, I'll confirm with the landlord whether he planted it or if it survived from before his time (he's been here approx 90 years, and I know one red oak and an eastern red cedar is older than he is). We do have Chinese/Japanese chestnuts on the grounds here that are more prolific and it's likely the seedlings I have are hybrids, but who knows?

One interesting thing I noted from the American vs. Chinese/Japanese chestnuts is the chestnut weevil does not appear to infect the nuts.

From the sound of your description, I would get in touch. You can probably find an email by googling.

I grew up on a farm near Media, Pennsylvania. We had quite a few American Chestnut trees. One of my first childhood memories is picking up the nuts off the grass. I doubt those trees are still there. I should go back sometime and see.

The article misstates

> There used to be about 4 million American chestnut trees in eastern U.S. forests, until chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) arrived […]

The number is closer to 4 billion with a B[1]

Their range was across eastern North America and I’ve read estimates that they may have been a quarter to a third of the trees in those forests before the blight arrived.

1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_chestnut

Astounding. Crazy to think about

It also makes me wonder. There was an estimated 30-60 million buffalo before colonialism in the Americas. However, those numbers were probably only possible to reach because of human activity driving out other apex predators and becoming themselves the apex predator. Similar story with paw-paws. Though they're not necessarily being threatened by anything currently, their range is decreasing. It turns out humans were essential for its distribution (likely due to other megafauna going extinct). Another example that comes to mind is the "prairie turnip" which as a staple food of many peoples that lived in the grasslands. Despite harvesting being a destructive process, the action actually ended up helping to spread their seeds. Without human harvest we've again seen a decrease in their range. I can also go on about how essential California cultural burns are for most of the "native" ecology, but I'm sure you get the point

Anyways I guess what I'm getting at is: I wonder how much humans played a role in it achieving such a widespread distribution.

There was a recent book called Dark Emu about aboriginal Australian's role in the native landscapes. Early colonists often remarked that the place looked like a giant, well-managed park. Well it turns out they actually did play a huge role in purposeful management of it. They even grew grains in massive monocultural fields that were often even larger than modern agricultural plots. Similarly there's been a ton of recent research into Amazonia and looking at it as a "manufactured landscape" because of how important the purposeful management of it by native peoples was to the ecosystem as a whole

This doesn't make sense. Buffalo are not predators of any sort and were not threatened much by other animals.

Horses (which competed with buffalo) and saber tooth tigers (which predates buffalo) are two examples that immediately come to mind of megafauna that went extinct around the time humans arrived. Though it's still debated how much that had to do with humans overhunting vs the shift from a glacial to an interglacial climate

Interestingly, I just walked out to a large chestnut tree on Spring Street by my place in Nevada City, CA and measured it's circumference - I got 127 inches, roughly - getting the tape measure around it was a bit challenging. It might be 40-50 feet tall but there is another much taller with less diameter down the hill from it (tree mentioned in article is 50 ft tree, 35 inch diameter, pretty average for here).

There are many chestnut trees in the town, planted in the gold rush days, I believe. last fall, I gathered enough nuts walk around town to supplement my diet for a few months. The nuts haven't started falling this year.

Of course, these tree survived the blight because they're well outside the range of the Eastern Chestnut. But still, if someone wants to see chestnut trees, they're here and probably in a lot of places where they were planted outside their range.

You can get non american chestnut trees all throughout the united states. It's only the american one has the disease problem

For the record, if you discover a long-lost extinct species, wait until you’ve collected seeds before you tell the world where you found it.

If this interests you, I highly recommend the novel "Overstory", which was a pulitzer prize winner in the last few years.

It's a fictional collection of stories, all linked by trees (it makes sense if you've read it).

Beautifully written, and gave me a huge appreciation for trees.

Reading the first chapters about the American Chestnut made me cry, and I’m not prone to crying. I had to put the book down for a week, and re-examine some of my beliefs about nature and mankind.

Yup, same recommendation. That was my first time even hearing about this massive, landscape shifting chestnut blight; I have no idea how it isn't now commonly known.

And it was just a really great story in general. Definitely recommend.

At least in some places it is widely (universally?) known. I’m surprised to see so many who don’t known.

I took high school biology in a classroom named after it. The Christmas song always got explicitly recognized for the loss it memorialized. Any worry about invasive exotics got a “next blight” rhetorical flourish. Our elementary school thanksgiving pageant included a chestnut character (it was a coveted costume). In the summer of 2020 the blight vs hoof and mouth was the frame in which COVID could be productively discussed. The list goes on…

Regardless, as one who knew, great recommendation.

> There used to be about 4 million American chestnut trees in eastern U.S. forests, until chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica) arrived in New York via infected plants and spread rapidly, nearly wiping out the majestic trees

Fwiw this is wrong -- it used to be 4 billion.

Yes! This is a remarkable typo that gives a very different impression of the history of the tree. 4 million trees in the whole eastern US would make them uncommon even at their peak, when the truth is that they were everywhere.

If this tree had a secret to cultivating a resistant strain that would be very awesome.

Is there a good app which lets you input your zip code, maybe also sun exposure and soil conditions, how many feet of width and height you have available, and then where it will spit out a list of well-suited tree specimens with some nice pictures of each?

Why stop at trees? I imagine you could do an alternate reality app for landscaping that shows you what your landscape "could look like". Including flower beds, ground cover alternatives to grass, etc.

I’ve wanted such an app for years. Ideally with a slider showing stages of growth, watering schedules, generating optimal planting patterns and figuring out plant counts.

Of course one-click ordering wouldn’t hurt, but I like to imagine you would still print out a shopping list and head over to the local nursery.

I've thought about finding this, or potentially building it if it doesn't exist.

I was thinking for gardens and fruit trees.

I'm particularly interested in well-suited plants because I will inevitably ignore them, and I'm hoping they can thrive without me.

I'm planting figs this fall.

Fig trees are excellent. My wife has one in her gatden, snd after just a few years ee get so many tasty fruits from a pretty small tree. I live in Bay Area and pretty much it is just water it a bit and every so often cut back weeds.

They are supposed to do well in my region, and require virtually zero maintenance after they're established. No insect pests ruin the fruit, which is a problem with nearly every other fruit tree in this area (the Ozarks).

My neighbors have some figs and they really taste amazing, a lot like a peach. I'm getting the same variety, although the name escapes me now.

They do get emptied out by local robbers sometimes--raccoons and possums--but otherwise no issues.

I'm really excited to get them in, after seeing the success next door.

> pretty small tree.

Im in New Zealand and made the mistake of planting one. It’s turning into a monster and they grow in every direction, fast.

When in SF unnoticed what out Pohutakawa have done over your way and was fairly impressed at their growth.

There's over 850 species of figs and many of them are edible. It's quite possible y'all are talking about different plants

But, then again, the common fig also has many many cultivars with different growth habits and fruits

It may be a different variety.

My neighbors have had theirs in 3 years, and I think they bought...1 year old trees? I can't recall now.

Anyhow, they are about four feet tall right now, and max height is 10-15 feet (4.5m).

A walk around the block looking at what grows is another option. Seedling and seed from those trees tend to do well.

Has anyone heard anything about the Darling 58 genetically modified American Chestnut that is resistant to the blight? Last I heard the USDA was reviewing it for approval to sell.

Still being reviewed… They have thousands of trees planted, and have had at least three generations of trees in the “wild” (in very controlled plots). There has been a lot of fort going in to introducing more diversity into the Darling 58 variety, with pollen from a wide range of American Chestnut populations being used to make the next generation.

Here’s the 2021 update for the program: https://www.esf.edu/chestnut/progress-report/2021.htm

Nice.

I have an F1 hybrid American/Chinese hazelnut in its 9th year on my little hobby farm (southern Ontario). It's done ok, no blight ... yet. It's too far from my other chestnuts (Chinese) to get pollinated to produce nuts tho. I keep meaning to get more trees. It's a nice looking tree.

Came here to say this. The Chestnut tree chapter was my favorite in the book.

The Seek app by iNaturalist is one possible way for armchair conservationists to catalog the trees on their property.

This app is unexpectedly fun to use. My family uses it like PoGo but with native plants and animals.

It's great but it just... isn't there yet. It's missing some core features from the desktop website. Seek is a better-made app that strips most of iNaturalist features to basically just make it a species identification app. Not sure if your observations even end up going towards citizen science initiatives like the main app does

The team behind iNaturalist is like 6 people (though they're hiring! I wanted to apply but it seems like they mostly need help with DevOps)

I used to live in a historic property in rural MI built in the 1800s. There was a huge chestnut tree growing on it that was at least 50ft tall and looked like it could've been as old as the house. I don't live near there anymore but I always wondered if it might have been an American chestnut.

We had one in the town I grew up in... I just checked google maps and sadly it has passed.

Every year around this time we seem to get somebody posting Chestnut tree articles that imply that it's impossible to grow an American chestnut tree or that somehow American chestnuts are rare. My Dunstan Chestnut tree is doing tremendously well after 5 years, and it has a circumference of more than a foot. They even sell them in Walmart now. What am I missing? Here is the link if you need one:https://chestnuthilloutdoors.com/learning-center/dunstan-che... They are very easy to grow.

Not certain, but that Dunstan is likely a hybrid species of American with Chinese chestnut for blight resistance.

The genetically pure American Chestnut tree was nearly eliminated by this blight. So backcrossed hybrids and genetically modified varieties of the American Chestnut are exciting, because there's a hope they could return to their former glory in the ecosystem.

This particular tree is a large specimen of genetically pure American Chestnut, growing in the east coast region as well, so a great find for conservation.

In all, hybrids may be great for individuals, but this movement intends to be more selective for restoration purposes.

I agree with you and know that the Dunstan is "debatable" to its origin. imho it's American, going by https://acf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/leafcard.pdf. I know I have a chestnut tree. I know it has lots of teeth and no hair. My point is more a point of having periodic postings about Chestnut trees. I think once every 5 years would be enough on the same exact subject. It has been a trend every year. OK so more people are just discovering the issue every year I guess.

It wouldn't be a pure chinese chestnut it would be a partial hybrid. someone such as yourself would not easily be able to tell

This is amazing. My parents liked to tell me that roasted chestnuts used to be a ubiquitous street food in NYC until they disappeared.

We've still got 'em. They must come from other species of chestnut trees now.

I often wonder how different the Blue Ridge mountains looked 100 years ago, with the American Chestnut and various other trees that different forms of blight have since killed. It’s kind of sad visiting Clingman’s Dome or Mt. Mitchell, where you can see the skeletons of all the dead trees.

I was walking through a local bird sanctuary this morning. The various species of woodpeckers are doing very well, because of all the dead and dying ash trees (Emerald Ash Borer.)

Is there a theory where this tree came from? Is it presumed blight resistant or just really lucky for its location? The old trees live on in the roots but the young shoots die off, presuming blight resistance, did it evolve asexually?

does anyone know if there are any american chestnuts with natural immunity (via mutations?) with 4 billion trees it would seem that there would be some. There are HIV immune individuals after all.

How can they all die so fast and sudden? Wouldn't we expect a certain % to have some immunity, and then those genes pass on and the population eventually recovers?

I read in the book "American Chestnut, The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree" by Susan Freinkel that when the blight was first discovered in the early 1900's scientists thought that cutting down chestnut trees in the east would stop the blight from spreading. Many trees were cut down that might have had some level of resistance to the blight.

Maybe that might have happened, but panic due to the blight massively increased logging of healthy Chestnuts trees. It wasn't just the blight that caused the ecological disaster; greed and shortsightedness probably played an equal part as well.

Plant immune systems aren't as adaptive as ours, and the American chestnut had no reason to evolve any immunity to the blight because it wasn't present on the continent until the early 1900s.

I still have a nut from a lone tree on my grandparents farm. I'm sure other trees are still out there in various places.

There is one in North Bergen, NJ. I won't say where. They can find it themselves!

I have one that's not a hybrid. It's a stressed tree in blight range (Hunterdon, NJ) but it soldiers on. Last year I got a few dozen chestnuts off of it. Normally I can only get a few.

(I also have two seedlings sprouted from chestnuts I gathered a few years back)

How'd you get your tree originally? Do you think it has some resistance? How large is it now?

See my other more recent comment for more details. It's old. I'm not so sure it has resistance other than it was likely a strong adult when the blight came, and the blight had an easier time killing trees that were not so massive.

Before I made last comment I tried to wrap a measuring tape around but it was only a 36 inch measuring tape and circumference of the two halves coming out of the base are at least another 6 inches after it. Height is harder to measure, maybe 30-40ft, it grows at the edge of the forest with multiflora rosebush around it, some hickory and tulip trees over it in height. Some branches have been cut off over the years and the bark is kinda gnarly.

Everytime I walk around here there's some new discovery of something new or old. Today I fished a live rusty female crawfish out of the pool and I'm pretty sure it's one of the first sightings of this invasive in this county. Nothing like looking down and going 'Oh I guess we have pool lobsters now'.

For a moment, I was wondering why would American conservative movement fixate itself with a tree!!?? (I need to unplug from news cycle)