I'm not looking forward to scads of those spiny seed covers ('burs' per Native Trees for North American Landscapes) (or whatever you call them) though.

Speaking of which, if blight-resistant genetically modified American Chestnut trees work out & become widely available, how many of you forum goers would plant one yourselves? Evidently they get huge, and the spiny burs look like bad news for a residential yard (if you like bare footing, or have pets).

Richard.

In the end if it has a good report I suppose I would plant one of these chestnuts.

My thinking:

I have a couple acer palmatum trees which are grafts of mutated (naturally maybe?) acer pamatums. This metasequoia ogon I have was created in a lab if I recall the irradiated seed story correctly. All essentially genetically modified, none listed as invasive.

Round-up ready food. Invasive, not my favorite, but I buy it. It is only a stone's throw from all these apples and other fruit we have modified through selective breeding.

I give my kid medicine when he is sick. This is going to allow him to reach adult hood and pass on his genes. Reverse evolution? Maybe, to this point it has helped humans spread. However in the long run it might make the species weaker but our brains have evolved ways to keep us going faster than our natural enemies have evolved. Same for me, that gall bladder problem probably would have gotten me by now if I were in the wild so score 1 for passing on genes which should not be passed on again.

Hitting again on the apple point, we have been genetically modifying dogs, cows, pigs and plants for 10k years through selective breeding so I am not "against it". Scientific modification has the potential for quicker mishaps though as we can make weird changes in small creatures which maybe will have a butterfly effect on the world around them.

Was that the question?

"I wonder just what features made it such a potent competitor vs. oak, maple, etc...? "

which is something I'm now wondering too...

And, they're beautiful trees. I do admit, it was a painful experience gathering the nuts, definitely a job for heavy gloves, but no worse than pruning the blackberry patch.

It's an amazingly beautiful tree, heavily built, lowly branched and with beautiful foliage. One of my favs of all the trees I've planted and disgustingly healthy so far. Over the years we have lost (and increasingly are losing) some of our most precious woodlands to the lure of cheap imported products with their devastating bugs and diseases. How many billions of dollars of damage is it worth? How cheap are those imports at the cash register when you factor in exterpated forests and domestic damage control?

vince

The original American chestnut tree grows very fast. Its habit in a woodland setting is very tall. Mature trees produce many nuts, and those nuts are a preferred food source of all manner of wildlife. I'm certain that the eastern gray squirrel is also a large part of its success.

I have been a casual observer of the eastern gray for a long time and wonder what impact the loss of the American chestnut had on its evolution. There are stories about those squirrels being rather large critters in olden times. I'll bet a steady diet of chestnuts didn't hurt the taste of squirrel.

Probably very little impact....after 60 years of Chestnut blight, squirrel population would change but a change in size needs a stronger and longer duration evolutionary pressure than that. Besides, they are such opportunistic feeders and have no shortage of food in urban areas, I would say, given your hypothesis they should be as they ever were right now.

Richard.

I've got a couple "timburr" chestnuts that I bought from Oikos tree crops up in Michigan this spring - They're supposed to have the most American-like growth in a hybrid chestnut. Has anyone ever grown this with success?

Jbob

I'd plant one - actually, you need two or more that are not clones of each other, so I'd plant more - but NOT in my yard. I like to go barefoot from time to time, and the spines from those burs take years to decompose enough that they won't penetrate tennis/walking shoe uppers.
GMO doesn't scare me one bit.

Hard to imagine how very different the eastern deciduous forest was from what we have today, just over 100 years ago - oaks, hickories, and maples were NOT the dominant canopy in many areas.

Mackel

Mackel

couple of things. as mentioned, extrememly fast growing. Also, unlike oaks, chestnut produces a consistent mast - large crop of nuts - every year. They are also crazy sprouters, so if damaged, they will resprout, like boxelder

'If American Chestnut is such a fast growing tree, how strong is the wood? Are we talking the durability of Silver Maple or Tulip Poplar or what?'

Chestnut wood is more durable than other fast growing trees because it is high in rot-resisting tannin. However, it is lighter than oak, and splits easily along the axis (which is GREAT if you want fence posts, but NOT good if you want furniture)

'"timburr" chestnuts that I bought from Oikos tree crops':

I have (had) 2. One died but probably had too much shade. The other is doing pretty well, but i get a lot of dieback. It COULD be because i am in zone 4. The timburr is noticeably more 'chinese' in appearance than other hybrids. I have had a lot more luck with Oikos' 'Viva' strain - although they say it might get blight and die.

disclamier: I have about a dozen chestnuts in a fairly large back yard. People at work (and my wife) think i am crazy because i won't stop talking about chestnuts. If you are not a 'nutter', look for a book called 'American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree' - it is AMAZING what happened to the eastern forests! And by the way, chestnuts are not really good for a yard due to the mess, but great for acreages, orchards and of course the forest!

I truly hope this breed can be successful, and we see a slew of these trees being planted in the near future.

I'm sure you believe what you said, but I can offer evidence to the contrary. When I was learning to drive in the mid 60's, squirrels were different. When the ran into the road and then saw a car coming, they would start to dart around in circles. Obviously this behavior might be successful trying to avoid a bird of prey, but it was not well suited to avoiding a car.

These days the eastern grey squirrel runs in a straight line. No more darting in circles. I noticed the change about 10 years ago.

My brother has a PhD in psychometrics. When I told him of this observation, he agreed that it was very plausible that a genetic change has occurred.

That's only 40 some years to see a change in a mammal. The American chestnut died off 80 years ago. I believe that today's squirrel is different, smaller, because of the loss of American chestnut.

Good luck to you.

Richard.

Fundamental changes in the gene code, rather than deemphasis and reemphasis, that are beneficial to the specie's survival occur in only one out of then thousand mutations. All of the rest of the mutations are deleterious to the individual and species carrying them. So most mutations actually have a negative pressure on the viability of a species, so change occurs very slow in this regard, in order to assure mutancy doesn't wipe the species out. I'd say more, but I get incoherent on Saturdays...

Mackel

One of them may still partially stand, but after living at least a hundred years, (state farm was established in the 1860s,trunk size was huge, and my knowledge) suffering the blight, and at least 2 lightning strikes in my memory, it was one sad looking grand dame when I last saw it.

My mother actually tried to grow some before she passed, but even she couldn't get them to root. She could grow a rock, but these were one of her few failures. I would love to someday plant a few for her and know they have a fair shot!

If they bred a C. dentata that was even only resistant (not immune) to the blight, I would plant more in a heartbeat.

I too have several Oikos hybrids. They are blooming for the first time this year, I am anxious to see what the nuts are like.

One interesting thing is that Chestnut was used for the horizontals in the Pennsylvania Dutch barns. Uprights were oak (for their greater compression strength?), but the siding and the floor logs were all chestnut in my barn. (Siding is now steel.) The "carrier beams" that underpin the chestnut floor logs are oak also. One great advantage to chestnut is that it is almost as strong as oak for many applications, but the weight is less than 1/2 as much.

First, the Chinkapin pics. These trees are smaller cousins of C. dentata, Am. chestnut. Nuts are smaller, trees are smaller. They fruit in 3 or 4 years. There are at least 2 races of Chinkapin. There are more than that in literature, but my experience is with 2 quite different versions of almost identical trees.

One grows tall, to 15ft. in less than 10 years, and has zero years to live when you first see the effects of the blight. Makes lots of nuts, generally about 5 days less than the other kind. The burrs have about 3 edible nuts and as many or more blanks, making for a rather large burr for the 3 nuts you get.

The other variety grows only 8-10 ft. tall and lives for a few years with the blight. The nuts are smaller and not quite as numerous, but the burr holds about 2 good nuts and only one or 2 blanks, so it makes a much smaller burr overall.

These are the different Chinkapins growing here. Seeds from the same man in OH.

The first is the short kind. The three photos show the clump from a wide angle, the new trees coming up, and a view of where they come from the root.

This one (below) also shows bloom on a 2yr. whip at the right of center. Spent bloom on the older trunks are to the upper left.

This is a ground level shot. It shows the multiple trunks and 2 stumps on the right.

This is a wide shot of the tall kind. The shrub on the right, Chionanthus vir. is not as close as it would seem.
It is hard to get more than one or 2 tall trees before they succumb, and they can die any month of the year. This variety also makes bloom in the fall (late Sep.) if the trunk is about to die.

This is a clump of Am. chestnut. The dead top shows it died after leaves came out this year.

This is what blight looks like. I took the bark off, and the borers showed up after the tree was dead.

This is unadulterated blight. The bark turns cinnamon before it splits, probably the blight spores? The smaller trunk at the right is the trunk of the photo of the dead top.

Finally, the reason I keep these trees. Before somebody flames me for contributing to the blight problem, you should know that Chestnut blight is hiding in all the Red Oaks around here, waiting for a North American Castanea to infect.
I just love the dainty hooks on the young leaves, the russet new leaves, the shiny pleated symmetry of the older leaves.

Your statement, "There are some fungi normally present in mud that can inhibit the blight fungus"....opens up a new area of broad investigation both in the field and in the lab. Perhaps it is research which has already been done and somehow I have missed it. Can you provide further direction on the subject?

I also have some of the Dunstan hybrids that grow well, but they have the bushy form of pure Chinese. Pruning is certainly needed to make them grow straight.

Bottom line is tho, you really can't do that on a mature tree, the bark-cracks would appear on up the tree trunk & branches by the dozens. That said, where I was in SW VA there was an untreated 50', 16 inch dia Amer chestnut nearby that had no sign of infection. I reasoned it was just one dang lucky tree.

Alabama, my largest "Timburr" hybrid chestnut isn't growing as upright (15' x 15') as OIKOS advertises, tho the leaves look exactly like pure Amer chestnut.

I'm in central Ohio (Delaware County, north of Columbus) right at the line between light blue and dark blue, and my pH is between 6.9 and 7.3 (which is relatively low for my area it turns out) depending on who does the test and where I take it on my property - the front yard is higher than the backyard...so, for me, the map is spot-on