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By LYT WOOD
County Forr*trr
Nursery stock quarantines, massive sanitation cuttings, and many other practices all failed to stop the spread of the American Chestnut Tree Bark Disease in the early 1900’s. The blight continued its southward march, reducing the great wild chestnut stands to myriads of gray, lifeless snags poking up above the young forests that sprung up to take their place.
In recent years, since the blight has swept across the entire Appalachian countryside, there have been many attempts to restore the American chestnut as a timber tree. The basic modern approaches are: hybridization, radiation, breeding surviving American chestnuts, and manipulating the fungus itself. In considering these attempts—and their likelihood of success—it is important to keep in mind the goal of this research: ‘Re-establish the American chestnut as a tree species that is able to survive and reproduce under natural forst conditions.”
Hybridization
As we have seen, the Asian species of chestnuts are resistant to the effects of the blight. (They are not immune to it, but neither are they harmed by it.) By crossbreeding American trees with resistant species, we hope to produce a strain of chestnut that is resistant to the blight.
This has, in fact, been accomplished many times. Remember, though, that our goal is to re-establish the chestnut in the forest. In order to obtain a tree that will be a viable competitor with other trees growing nearby, our chestnut must have a straight, tall stem, and be able to overtop its competing trees before it is suppressed by them.
We have, to date, been unsuccessful in our attempts to come up with a strain that has both characteristics, i.e.
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