Could the Chestnut Come Back?
By 
There’s a little spot off one of Rhode Island’s rural highways (we do have them) where there is an experimental plot to grow the American chestnut, grafted with bits of other chestnuts to hopefully someday create a tree that can resist the chestnut blight that eliminated the dominant species of the eastern hardwood forest a century back. With the elm now gone and the ash just about gone and the hemlock not too far behind them, we are getting to the point of significantly simplified forests in the tremendously ecological complex eastern side of the North American continent. It’s sad stuff. I stopped at that site once and just as I did, some swamp yankee pieces of shit threw a slurpee or something at my car and hit it just below the driver side window, which was highly alarming, though clearly memorable.
But this tree once known as “the redwood of the East” is not completely extinct. Visit a farmers market during this time of year, and you still might find yourself gazing down at a basket of shiny, nickel-sized red-brown chestnuts. Ninety-five percent of the few chestnuts Americans eat are imported from Japan, China, or Europe, but these farmers market chestnuts are described as American chestnuts, like ghosts of autumns past. But if the American chestnut is extinct, where did these nuts come from — and what exactly can you do with them?
In October, Gastropod co-hosts Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley traveled down to the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains to Bryant Farm, where they found themselves standing beneath the spreading limbs and jagged-edged leaves of young chestnut trees — American chestnuts, but not exactly as Beecher might have known them. These trees are hybrids of American and Chinese chestnuts, bred to be resistant to the blight that wiped out their native ancestors. This hybridization is just one strategy taken by a growing movement to bring back this iconic American tree. It’s a challenge that involves Dolly Parton, strip-mined mountain tops, and wheat genes, for a story of love, loss, and reconnection that Gastropod tells in their latest episode.
Kim and David Bryant, the husband-and-wife team that owns and operates Bryant Farm, are growing Dunstan chestnuts, developed in the 1950s when Ohio resident James Carpenter discovered a single living American chestnut in a grove of completely dead trees. Plant breeder Robert T. Dunstan crossed this miraculous tree with Chinese chestnuts known for their nut production. The result is a tree with multiple practical benefits for nut growers: Not only should they survive infection by chestnut blight, but thanks to the genes of their Chinese ancestors, these trees are shorter, topping out at only 40 to 50 feet.
Dunstan chestnuts have been growing in orchards around the U.S. since the 1960s, and are likely the source of the nuts that East Coasters most often see advertised as “American chestnuts.” In the future, they may not be the only source; scientists are currently seeking approval from the USDA to deregulate a genetically modified American chestnut, which would allow it to be planted in forests around the country.
But, even if today’s chestnut farmers are not tending exact replicas of the country’s chestnuts of old, they play an important role in the tree’s revival, both in American forests and in American culture.
I mean, this could be huge. Maybe it’s not the classic chestnut of the past. But given that every single species and every single ecosystem on this planet is now profoundly impacted by human behavior, bringing the chestnut back to the forest if possible is a huge thing. Not to mention the food they provide all the critters, from squirrels to bears to whatever species Rhode Island’s swamp yankee population belongs to.