Rediscovering America’s long lost chestnut tree

FALLS VILLAGE — On Sunday, Sept. 14, a small crowd gathered at the American Chestnut Orchard at the foot of The Great Mountain Forest on Undermountain Road in Falls Village to hear Ellery “Woods” Sinclair talk about the American chestnut tree – the restoration of which he has championed for many years. The orchard was planted for that purpose.

Sinclair, a former English teacher, is manager of the orchard, planted in 2006 by students of the Ag-Ed Department of Housatonic Valley Regional High School and its teacher Mark Burdick. They planted 25 trees in each row, for a total of 80 trees across the two-acre lot. Students have returned ever since to help maintain it.

It had been, Sinclair said, “the single most abundant tree” in America, with one out of five trees being an American chestnut and “an important food for wildlife, from bees getting, to caterpillars eating its leaves, to deer and bear eating the chestnuts.”

Sinclair said that the American chestnut is an “iconic tree.”

“Many of the houses around here were built from white oak or chestnut. But chestnut is impervious to rot.” It was used for furniture, house framing, shingles, firewood, and coffins, and it provided the wood preservative, tannin.

In 1904, an Asian fungus, cryphonestria parasitica, was accidentally introduced into the United States. “By 1911, thirty percent of the American chestnuts in the United States were hopelessly infected,” Sinclair said. “By 1950, four billion, over nine million acres were destroyed by the blight.”

Sinclair said, Dr Leila Pinchot, restoration ecologist from the US Forest Service, who’s specialty is reintroducing American chestnut trees, was instrumental in helping to start the orchard.

Sinclair explained, “The trees in the orchard are hybrids. Fifteen-sixteenths American chestnut and one-sixteenth Chinese chestnut.” The Chinese chestnut is resistant to the fungus causing the blight.

Jack Swatt, President of the Connecticut chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, stated that they now feel that the amount of Chinese Chestnut should be higher because all of the trees in the orchard have been infected by the blight to some degree.

He added that the solution to getting blight-resistant trees will probably be a mixture of techniques including adding genes from trees like willows which are resistant to the fungus and which trigger attacks on the fungus and kill it.”

Before introducing any genetic engineering into the environment, Swatt said, “It must be approved by many agencies and deregulated. It must be proven not to be a danger to the environment.”

Swatt feels it is well worth pursuing genetic engineering in order to “restore the environment” that the American chestnut had a large part in sustaining, being a keystone species.

Sinclair said, “A greatest pleasure has been rediscovery and regeneration of interest in and appreciation by family and students for the American chestnut.”