Restoring living history

The effort to bring back the American chestnut tree is a noble effort.

This painstaking work might not seem all that meaningful to many of us.

If modern Virginians appreciate the effort, it might be because they approve of the environmental implications of restoring the tree to its habitat. It might be because they are interested in the science of the work being done. These are cool, rational reasons.

But modern Virginians likely do not experience the intensely emotional connection to the chestnut tree that is felt by a remaining handful of folks.
Our disconnection has two sources. Practically, we are removed from land in almost all ways. We live in cities and suburbs; we have an attenuated relationship with the land as our source of sustenance. We get our food from the grocery store, less frequently from gardens and less frequently still from wild trees and bushes, herbs and flowers.

Generationally, we are far removed from the days when the giant trees dominated the forests and provided both sustenance and beauty for local residents. The days of the chestnut’s dominance are mere tales told by great-grandfathers.

But talk to those folks who remember the chestnut, and you will be struck by their sorrow — or their passion. They speak of the loss of the tree as if it were the death of a friend. And in fact, that’s exactly what it was.
The chestnut was a cash crop for many poor farmers and mountaineers. It fed their animals. Its wood helped build their homes and barns. Its blossoms glorified the springtime, and its magnificent canopies were a sheltering presence.

When the chestnut tree was virtually eradicated by blight, people lost a source of food, shelter, beauty — and security.
Imagine the impact. The chestnut blight took hold here in our Virginia mountains during the struggles of the Great Depression. Seeing the massive, seemingly invincible trees succumb to disease must have felt like one more blow from inexorable fate. The mainstay of the mountains was gone — another loss in a sea of losses.

Some old-timers have gone to their graves mourning the demise of the chestnut.
So bringing the tree back to life is more than a scientific challenge or an environmental oddity. It is an intense, and sometimes intensely personal, imperative.

Some few trees have survived, or grown again from the stumps of the old. Researchers are now trying to redevelop the American chestnut by successively crossbreeding with the Chinese chestnut, the imported species that brought the blight to this country and also carries resistance to the disease.

With enough work, researchers hope to produce a plant that has the look of the American chestnut but the disease resistance of the Chinese variety.
Purists may bemoan the fact that any plants created thusly will not exactly be the chestnut of old. The chestnut will not so much be resurrected as recreated.

But progress is progress, and any effort that gets us closer to a viable replacement is encouraging.

Maybe one day, modern Virginians can have a taste — literally and figuratively — of the glory that was the American chestnut.